HERB - Lion and Locust wording in a period recipe

[Kathleen Keeler]

M&L Romanowski wrote:

> > Jasmine, I don't remember male crustaceans having any sort of external
> > testicle.  The females do have pleopods (leg-fin type things which are found
> > under the tail section.  They use these to circulate water around their eggs
> > and to carry the egg around.  (I am reaching way back into ancient memories of
> > college biology here!)  I don't think that this would be a fatty region of a
> > lobster.
>
> Alana of Loch Mor

I actually wasn't proposing that the parts of whatever sea animal a lion locust
would be
has the actual testes to check but that people could find a part to use based on
that description.
Animal morphology was full of fallacies by our standards in Period -- note that
plants didn't have sex or sex parts until the 18th Century -- invertebrate
structures are odd enough that most of us can't name the parts of a crayfish or a
clam.

Jasmine copied
 "For in some membranes, where the Testes are bound
together, under which there are some soft Carbuncles, and tender,
that are called Lions Fat. "

Looking up testes I find that English testes is from testis, testis m = testicle
but testis testis c is a witness, spectator (think about that for puns!) and testa
testae f is an earthen pot, pitcher, jug; pottery, brick, potsherd; shell;
shellfish; crust.  [Hand dictionary of the Latin and English languages, 1962]
I could therefore assume wrong test- used in the English and paraphrase

"for in some membranes where the shells are bound together, under which are some
soft tumors and tender that are called "lion's fat".

[carbunculus is defined as "carbuncle (jewel or tumor)"]

I don't know that I think my interpretation is likely to be more accurate than
disregarding the phase "a kind of locust" and considering it just lion's fat, but
it represents an alternate interpretation.  We can use it to highlight the
difficulties of 2000 years and 2-3 translators of changing languages and different
continents with different familiar animals and plants.

I also found a section in one of the works Cockayne translated that tells of all
the healing uses of the parts of a lion, and being that was Anglo-Saxon, they won't
likely have actually seen lions.  On the other hand there was no face cream among
those medicinal uses  of a lion.

Cheers
Agnes
kkeeler1 at unl.edu

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