Debby Banham

Anglo‐Saxon attitudes: In search of the origins of English racism

Abstract In this article I examine the attitudes of the dominant ethnic group in Anglo‐Saxon England, the Germanic ‘settlers’, to the subordinate group, the indigenous British. 1 confine myself to the earlier period, before the tenth century, because the British population of England has disappeared from the historical record by that time. This probably means they had been absorbed into Anglo‐Saxon society and were no longer recognised as a distinctive group. Then, partly by means of a comparison with white English attitudes to black people today, I ask whether Anglo‐Saxon attitudes constituted, in modem terms, a racist ideology, and conclude that they did. Realising that this question will be held by some historians to be illegitmate, I finish by considering why they might take this view, and suggesting that racism has in fact been part of English national identity from the beginning.

The diagnosis and treatment of wounds in the old English medical collections: Anglo-Saxon surgery?

This volume brings together essays that consider wounding and/or wound repair from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe.

Book Reviews: Health and healing from the medieval garden.

The connection between medieval gardens and the medicine of the period is firmly fixed in the popular imagination (see especially the works of Ellis Peters), but has received considerably less attention from the scholarly community. This collection is thus extremely welcome, not only in that it fills what might seem to be a rather obvious gap in the literature, but also for bringing to the task some of the biggest names in medieval medicine, as well as some less usual suspects. As one might expect in such a collection, the contributions vary in how closely they focus on the connection made in the title: some deal with plants in medicine without exploring explicitly how the materia medica was supplied, while others are more concerned with gardens than with the specific uses of their products, and some deal with plants which may well have been grown in gardens and used in medicine, but focus on other aspects, such as their names. The collection opens with a substantial contribution by one of the editors, Alain Touwaide, on the classical background, which will be particularly valuable for non-specialist readers, who may not realize how much medieval medicine (or horticulture) owed to the ancient world, and which sets the scene for the following papers. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I am particularly pleased to see how many of them deal with early medieval England: Peter Dendle (the other editor) on ‘Plants in the early medieval cosmos’, then, narrowing the focus a little, Maria Amalia D’Aronco on ‘Plants and herbs in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts’, Philip G Rusche on ‘The sources for plant names in Anglo-Saxon England’, and Marijane Osborn on ‘Women’s reproductive medicine in Leechbook III’. Later medieval England is not neglected either, with Linda Voigts on ‘Linking the vegetable with the celestial in late medieval texts’, Peter Jones on ‘Herbs and the medieval surgeon’ (i.e. John of Arderne), and George R Keiser on the introduction (or perhaps reintroduction—the Anglo-Saxons did at least have a word for it) of rosemary, not to mention Terence Scully on ‘A cook’s therapeutic use of garden herbs’, including England, though mainly focused on France. But the geographical range is as wide as the time-frame, confined neither to western Europe (Touwaide’s second contribution is on ‘The jujube tree in the eastern Mediterranean’) or to Christendom (Expiracion Garcia Sanchez on the gardens of al-Andalus). The contributions also range from ferociously scholarly text-based work to broader brush-strokes, and to the interestingly practical, with Deirdre Larkin’s closing paper on recreating medieval gardens (an unfortunate proof-reading error has given her the running head Horus (for Hortus) redivivus, but there are no Egyptian deities in her piece—the range is not quite that wide). It would be invidious in such a short review to pick out individual papers for praise or criticism, but I recommend the collection as a whole not only to medievalists (both early and late), but to anyone who may believe that the classical legacy was neglected or unknown until the humanists rediscovered it, and to all those interested in plant-based medicine, materia medica, or the history of horticulture. The editors deserve our gratitude for bringing these scholars together (the collection stems from a conference held at Penn State in 2003) and for sharing their findings with a wider audience.