2013Gushurst.Moore10169745phd

University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk 04 University of Plymouth Research Theses 01 Research Theses Main Collection 2012 A GARDEN IN HER CUPS: BOTANICAL MEDICINES OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN HOME, C.1580 1800 Gushurst-Moore, Bruna http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/1253 University of Plymouth All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author's prior consent. 1 2 A GARDEN IN HER CUPS: BOTANICAL MEDICINES OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN HOME, C.1580 – 1800 BRUNA GUSHURST-MOORE PLYMOUTH UNIVERSITY THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY NOVEMBER, 2012 3 4 SHORT ABSTRACT Ph.D THESIS NOVEMBER, 2012 A GARDEN IN HER CUPS: BOTANICAL MEDICINES OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN HOME, C.1580 – 1800 1 BRUNA GUSHURST-MOORE PLYMOUTH UNIVERSITY This thesis focuses on the domestic use of plant-based medicines within Early Modern English and Colonial American households, and establishes the defining framework of a domestic botanical culture. It reconstructs the relationship between domestic, popular, and learned medical cultures to reveal the breadth of that practice, demonstrating the unique characteristics of the domestic culture which are underpinned by a shared canon of herbs and a high degree of flexible adaptability by individual practitioners. The botanicals (medicinal plants and the remedies made from them) are themselves analysed through the genres of household receipt book manuscripts, private letters, and journals, as well as almanacs, vernacular medical books, travel writing and settler texts in order to explore more fully and expand our understanding of the domestic culture within a broad social setting. Oral, scribal, and print networks are reconstructed in order to demonstrate that domestic medical practitioners shared a distinctive and influential medical construct, commonly portrayed by current scholarship as a mere reflection of popular and learned practices. Close engagement with both Early Modern English and Colonial women’s receipt books in particular reveals a commonality of practice based upon a shared materia medica which was sensitive and responsive to individual adaptation. Old and new world herbs are examined as a means of providing ingress into this shared and communal domestic practice, as well as to highlight the prevalence and importance of household individualization. The clear commonality of plants in trans-Atlantic domestic use demonstrates a continuous, shared, inherited practice which ends only with eighteenth-century Colonial inclusion of indigenous plants not found in the shared canon. Contemporary views of Early Modern and Colonial domestic medical practice are explored in order to argue that far from simply reflecting learned medical thinking and practice, domestic knowledge and use of botanical medicines was uniquely practical, communal, and flexible in its administration and expression. 1 Papers arising from this dissertation have been presented at the Burthen of the Mortal Body conference, Exeter University, September 2010; the Sick of Being Sick conference, Oxford University, September 2011; and the Herbal History Seminary Session, NIMH, March 2012. 5 6 LONG ABSTRACT Ph.D THESIS NOVEMBER 2012 A GARDEN IN HER CUPS: BOTANICAL MEDICINES OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN HOME, C.1580 – 1800 BRUNA GUSHURST-MOORE PLYMOUTH UNIVERSITY This thesis focuses on the domestic use of plant-based medicines within Early Modern English and Colonial American households, establishing the defining framework of a domestic botanical culture by examining both the contexts in which these medicines were employed, as well as the plants themselves. It reconstructs the relationship between domestic, popular, and learned medical cultures to reveal the breadth of that practice, demonstrating the unique characteristics of the domestic culture which are underpinned by a shared canon of herbs and a high degree of flexible adaptability by individual practitioners. The thesis further considers how domestic practices and knowledge were communicated and held, looking at oral, scribal, and print cultures and their impact on transmission routes, as well as individual plants in common use across the Anglo-American domestic spectrum which were representative of household use and practice. The thesis is less interested in the details of individual practitioners’ lives than in the socio-culturally structured nature of Anglo-Colonial domestic medical practice, and as such it turns to a range of sources, including household receipt book manuscripts, private letters, and journals, almanacs, vernacular medical books, travel writing, and settler texts, in order to explore more fully, and expand our understanding of, the domestic culture within a broad social setting. A close engagement with Early Modern English and Colonial American women’s receipt books reveals a commonality of practice based upon a shared materia medica which was sensitive and responsive to individual adaptation, while reference to popular printed texts aimed at a domestic audience highlights the social pervasiveness and wider cultural placing of that practice. A broad geographical context of ‘England and Empire’, including the writing and practice of householders from both sides of the Atlantic, has been adopted as a means of assessing the widespread Anglo-American cultural application of domestic medicine throughout the period. Along similar lines, the thesis examines material from the late-sixteenth through to the eighteenth- century as this period contains the whole of the domestic culture under study here. This strategy has a twofold aim: first, to establish the common practice employed by Anglo-American householders, and secondly, to identify changes in that practice as they emerged in the eighteenth-century. Either group of primary sources, Early Modern English, and Colonial American, has been largely investigated as autonomous sets, for example, scholars considering 7 domestic English sources of botanical knowledge, particularly the receipt books, have largely done so in the context of extended English social and gender histories, while scholarly examination of American sources, particularly of cookbooks, has drawn useful comparisons between the material and cultural histories of the products themselves with the Colonial social and cultural context employing them. 2 A relatively few number of scholars have considered the broader ‘expanded Britain’ connection, as seen for example, in Londa Scheibinger and Claudia Swan’s consideration of the Anglo-American, expanded British Empire, aspect of domestic medicine and botany in the West Indies . 3 The thesis develops this last approach to the domestic sources on the premise that the schism between Anglo and Colonial American sources and practices prior to the eighteenth-century is an artificial one which does not serve the whole of the period under study well. Indeed, it is only in the mid- to late- 2 Scholarship concerned with English sources include Raymond A. Anselment, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671-1714 , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Margaret J.M. Ezell, 'Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women's Life Writing' in Genre and women's life writing in early modern England , Julie A. Eckerle & Michelle M. Dowd, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007), pp.33-48; Catherine Field, "'Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women's Recipe Books’ in Genre and women's life writing in early modern England, Julie A. Eckerle & Michelle M Dowd, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007); Mary Fissell, ed., the Bulletin of History of Medicine special issue, ’Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe’, Vol. 82 (2008) pp.1-17; Mary Fissell,’Readers, text & contexts: Vernacular medical works in early modern England‘ in The Popularization of Medicine, 1650-1850 , Roy Porter, ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 72-96; Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”’ in The Medical Marketplace and Its Colonies c. 1450-c 1850 , M. Jenner and P. Wallis, eds. (place: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), pp. 133-52, Elaine Leong, ’Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household‘, Bulletin History of Medicine , 82 (2008), 145-68; Margaret Pelling, ‘The Women of the Family? Speculations around Early Modern British Physicians’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1995), 383 – 401; Sara Pennell, ’Pots and Pans History: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England‘, Journal of Design History , Vol.11, No.3 (1998), 201 -16; Sara Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice? Women Manuscript Recipes’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts Writing: selected papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium , Victoria Elizabeth Burke and Jonathan Gibson eds., (Place: Ashgate Publishing, 2004) pp.237-58; Linda Pollock, With Faith in Physic, The life of a Tudor Gentlewoman: Lady Grace Mildmay 1552-1620 (London; Collins and Brown, 1993). Scholarship which has focused largely

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