Women's Medicine, Women's Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms Author(s): L. M. C. Weston Reviewed work(s): Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Feb., 1995), pp. 279-293 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438781 . Accessed: 03/12/2011 18:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Philology. http://www.jstor.org Women's Medicine, Women's Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms L. M. C. WESTON California State University, Fresno What remains to us of Anglo-Saxon medicine is less a unified system than a palimpsest (or perhaps a collage) of traditions Greco-Roman and Germanic, literate and oral, Christian and pagan. The creators of the manuscripts usually called Lacnunga (Harley 585) and Leechbook (Regius 12 D xvii), which contain between them the bulk of extant medical remedies, consciously situate their works within a classical scientific tradition. Leechbookcites Pliny; both it and Lacnunga draw upon Alexander of Tralles.l The first two of Leechbook'sthree parts follow the pattern of classical texts by listing prescriptions for exter- nal and internal disorders from the head down; Lacnunga accompa- nies an Old English translation of the Herbariumof Apuleius. Within these frames-classical and scientific even in their project of systematically compiling remedies as written texts-the manuscripts place empirical prescriptions based on local as well as originally Med- iterranean materia medica, and a number of nonscientific charms and amulets both Greco-Roman and Germanic. These magical remedies, especially numerous in Lacnunga, locate the manuscripts at the point where oral and textual traditions meet even more explicitly than do the scientific prescriptions. Their talismans need to be literally rein- scribed on parchment, cloth, or wax: the written text itself constitutes materiamedica. Other charms and prayers lie dormant on the page un- til said aloud: their efficacy is wholly oral and performative. Such magical formulas invoke both Christ and Woden-some- times, as with the Nine Herbs Charm, in the same incantation. Earlier 1. Godfrid Storms, Anglo-SaxonMagic (The Hague, 1948), pp. 14-15, 19. For a more detailed account of Anglo-Saxon medicine's debt to classical science, see M. L. Cam- eron, "The Sources of Medical Knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England," Anglo-SaxonEng- land 11 (1983): 135-55. Both Harley 585 (Lacnunga) and Regius 12 D xvii (Leechbook)are manuscripts in the holdings of the British Library. ? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/95/9203-0001$01.00 279 280 MODERN PHILOLOGY commentators like Godfrid Storms spoke of Christian interpolations; more recent scholars locate the charms within a tradition of Chris- tian magic, the rise ofwhich has been documented most recently by Valerie Flint.2 Internal evidence suggests Lacnunga's monastic origin: J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer attribute the piecemeal compila- tion of the text to, among others, "the medicus of a monastery" and "the inmate of some small monastery in the North in which Irish influence survived."3 The prevalence of Christian liturgy as well as the repeated inclusion of masses and paternosters in its charms leads Karen Jolly to conclude that the most likely Anglo-Saxon magico- medical practitioner was, as often as not, a village priest. She notes that most of the rituals using masses or litanies are pitted against ill- ness of supernatural origin; a priest and only a priest, she posits, could bring against evil spirits his authority as mediator between God and man, this world and the other.4 Less obviously Christian charms, however, seem to invoke the presence of that other magical techni- cian, the shaman. For Stephen Glosecki, the charm "Against a Sud- den Stitch" offers the most pronounced instance of shamanic healing, for "whoever composed this charm-a preliterary and pre- Christian doctor, most likely-recounts direct experience of the dreamtime" and of spiritual combat against otherworldly enemies.5 Among these contrasting influences, however, we should identify yet one more: gender. Both manuscripts encode a male textual tradi- tion. This is particularly true of Leechbook,where a Latin poem names an owner, Bald, and his scribe, Cild, who combined previous books compiled by editors named Oxa and Dun. Lacnunga, too, invokes the male as the normative voice, except in its metrical childbirth charm(s). In these verses, known to modern scholars as "For a Delayed Birth,"6 as nowhere else, a woman speaks on her own behalf, suggesting that we might well ask who, among the Anglo-Saxons, had the primary 2. Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in EarlyMedieval Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1991). 3. J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (London, 1952), pp. 19, 21. 4. Karen Louise Jolly, "Anglo-Saxon Charms in the Context of a Christian World View,"Journal of MedievalHistory 11 (1985): 279-93; see also her later "Magic, Miracle, and Popular Practice in the Early Medieval West: Anglo-Saxon England," in Religion, Science and Magic: In Concertand in Conflict,ed. Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Fredrichs, and Paul Vir- gil McCraken Flesher (New York, 1989), pp. 166-82. 5. Stephen Glosecki, Shamanismand Old English Poetry(New York, 1989), p. 14. 6. E. V. K. Dobbie, The Anglo-SaxonMinor Poems (New York, 1942), pp. 123-24; all ci- tations of the charms are from this edition. These charms have also been edited by Felix Grendon, The Anglo-Saxon Charms(New York, 1909), pp. 206-9; Storms, pp. 196-203; and Grattan and Singer, pp. 189-91. L. M. C. Weston o Women's Medicine, Women's Magic 281 responsibility for healing, and most especially for managing child- birth. These responsibilities are less documented than those of male doc- tors like Bald, Oxa, and Dun, at least partly because female healing practices constituted less a professional specialty than an inseparable part of everyday domestic duties and participation in the community of women. Despite the masculine ordering principle responsible for the preservation of the medical remedies as we now have them in the Leechbookand Lacnunga, and despite the identification by name of three physicians, all male, it seems at least possible that women con- tributed much to medical wisdom, with the metrical childbirth charms being only the most obvious instance. We may, indeed, go so far as to suggest the existence of an identifiable female medical tradition, one which came to be partially appropriated by male authorities even as it was viewed with suspicion. Audrey Meaney documents women's heal- ing function within the household, and documents, too, the less be- nign view of this healing, especially where it involved charming, taken by churchmen like Aelfric.7 Glosecki, though identifying his shaman as normatively male (and connecting him to similarly male warriors and smiths), notes the existence of shamankas and indeed "the apparent association of shamanizing with women in saga lore."8 We may assume, however, that women's healing would not have con- sisted wholly of belief in and service to supernatural powers. M. L. Cam- eron, championing the commonsense rationality of many of Leechbook's and Lacnunga's herbal remedies, argues that use of copper or iron utensils displays not superstition but an empirical knowledge of chem- ical reactions. Cameron assumes the masculinity and professionalism of the healer. He speaks of "materials available to the Anglo-Saxon physi- cian, drawn from both his ancestral pagan Teutonic background and from the Mediterranean culture introduced by Christian missionar- ies."9 But who else, we may ask, would have known such chemical reac- tions? Women-at least some of them-could have gained the kind of common sense to which Cameron has drawn our attention from everyday experience with health problems, in the same way that they 7. Audrey L. Meaney, "Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England," in Superstitionand Popular Medicine in Anglo-SaxonEngland, ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester, 1989), pp. 9-40. For a discussion of medieval women's participation in their own heal- ing, see Monica Green, "Women's Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Eu- rope," in Sisters and Workersin the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett (Chicago, 1989), pp. 39-78. 8. Glosecki, p. 100. 9. M. L. Cameron, "Anglo-Saxon Medicine and Magic," Anglo-SaxonEngland1 (1988): 191-215, 211. 282 MODERN PHILOLOGY learned, for example, the unfortunate consequences of using an iron pot to preserve fruit or the necessity of using one if onion skins are to yield an olive green dye. A few potions and charms found their way into medical texts. Many more healing salves and strengthening brews for women in labor were no doubt passed on through oral tradition, from mother to daughter, along with recipes, instructions for cheese-mak- ing, pickling and preserving, and making dye and soap. While such empirical remedies escape their original gendered so- cial context once they are transcribed into a manuscript, the metrical childbirth charms-indeed any remedies incorporating ritual or otherwise requiring performance-retain more of their gendered speaking voice and their connection to an oral tradition. Granted, this connection is not a simple one.