Hybrid Healing: Old English Remedies and Medical Texts

Description: Through combinations of instructive prose and incantatory verse, liturgical rituals and herbal recipes, Latinate learning and oral tradition, the Old English remedies offer hope not only for bodily ailments but also for such dangers as solitary travel, swarming bees and stolen cattle. Hybrid healing works from the premise that the tremendous diversity of Old English medical texts requires an equally diverse range of interpretative methodologies. Through a case study approach, this exploration of early medicine offers a series of close readings tailored specifically to individual remedies, drawing from a range of fields including plant biology, classical rhetoric, archaeology, folkloristics and disability studies. Embracing the endless complexity of these Old English texts, Hybrid healing argues that the healing power of individual remedies ultimately derives from a dynamic and unpredictable process that is at once both deeply traditional and also ever-changing.

Review Quotes:

'The success of Garner's work is to emphasise the importance of nuanced and attentive analysis, and that it is crucial to recognise the uniqueness of each individual text. What also comes through in Garner's work are benefits of carefully reflecting on those individualities and the multifaceted (or even hybrid) influences that shaped their production.'
R. J. Salter, Scriptorium

'This book is not quite what it seems [it] does not focus on medicine as a discipline, or as a set of practices. Its subject is medical texts, or rather a small and very specific selection from those extant in Old English, and the ways in which they can be seen as "hybrids" between different literary genres...There has, of course, already been much cross-fertilization between the history of medicine and literary studies, so far looking mainly at texts in Latin or later European vernaculars. This is to the benefit of both disciplines, as long as each recognizes the value of the other, and its own limitations. Old English scholars are still catching up with this trend, and thus work like Garner's must be welcomed as helping to extend this stimulating dialogue into new territory. '
Debby Banham, Journal of British Studies