St Bonaventure's Church Hall
83 Parkway in Welwyn Garden City, Herts AL8 6JF
First Wednesday of each month at 8.00 p.m.


Wed 3rd September 2008
An Introduction to
Anglo-Saxon Herbal Medicine
Conan T Doyle

This talk will introduce the fascinating world of Anglo-Saxon herbal medicine which was inherited by the Anglo-Saxons from the Roman world, and ultimately derives from a tradition of herbal medical texts originating in Greece in the second century BC.
While early scholars of Old English medical texts viewed these herbal remedies as slavish copies of Roman medicine, rendering them ‘mere literary exercises’ more recent scholarship suggests that the Old English translations of the Herbal texts were in fact modified specifically for the British climate, that the recipes were effective, and that the Mediterranean herbs prescribed in these recipes were in fact grown or imported by Anglo-Saxon monasteries.