Evelyn: Welcome to another episode of Eating the Past series on herbs, spices, and flavorings.
I'm your host, Evelyn Funda, and this episode concludes our discussion with Shakespearean scholar Phebe Jensen by focusing on herbal medicines related to women's health.
Today, we pick up with a discussion of an herbal fertility treatment that comes from the 16th century work, "A Book of Secrets."
Phebe: So, I'm just going to give you one more, which, because it's sort of amusing, this is also from "A Book of Secrets." It's a fertility treatment. So, to cure fertility the wife is supposed to eat rabbit, mercury, mug wort, and valerian. So, herbs and other things. But the husband takes a potion made of cypress, nasturtiums, pepper, nutmegs, aloe, and the kidney and stones of testicles of a hedgehog. So that gives you a just a general sense of of recipes and their wide...
Evelyn: So, mercury and testicles.
Phebe: Yes, mercury and testicles. There's a lot of animal parts, which I have mostly skipped over. They're sort of appalling. Combined with herbs and spices. And then taken often at certain times of the day. And there's one example of this in Shakespeare, in a play called "All's Well That Ends Well."
There's actually a female healer whose name is Helena and she has inherited a recipe, or a receipt. It's the same word in the early modern period to cure the king who has suffering from a horrible infection called a fistula. And so she takes the recipe. We don't know what's in it, but she takes it, and with it she's able to cure the king. So, that's an example, both of Shakespeare using recipes or receipts for medical purposes. But also of the fact that it's women who are tasked with healing their family.
They are in charge of both diet, but also medical needs, and so they really tend to be some of the most important practitioners. Especially at the lower levels of society when it comes to medicine.
Evelyn: Wow.
Phebe: And then a second instance of this kind of subtext is with Ophelia in Hamlet. As you probably know, she gives out herbs in a kind of mad way to everyone in the court: rosemary, pansies, rue, fennel, columbines, and it turns out that most of these herbs are associated with women's reproductive health. There are herbs that induce menses or provoke miscarriage.
So that's a very poignant subtext to this woman, who has been jilted by her lover, and her lover has killed her father, and she's sort of gone mad as a result of that.
Evelyn: We sincerely want to thank Professor Phoebe Jensen for our mini series on how understanding the herbal knowledge of Shakespeare and the early modern thinkers can deepen our understanding of his plays.
If you missed any of the previous episodes or want to take a closer look at the quotes Dr. Jensen read for us, visit us at our show notes on the upr.org website, and join us next time for more on how herbs, spices, and flavorings have enhanced our food and sometimes changed our history.
That's Sundays at noon, right before the splendid table on your UPR station.
