As noted by M. L. Cameron, Early Medieval England boasts the earliest collection of vernacular medical texts north of the Alps. The bulk of them are translations of classical materials, such as the Latin Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus attributed to Sextus Placitus (fifth century). Their textual transmission is a notoriously knotty problem, since they exist in multiple versions and in various manuscripts contexts, sometimes as standalone translations, and in other cases as individual remedies or groups of remedies mixed in with native Old English “folk” medicine, charms, prognostics, and prayers. In recent decades, a great deal of labor by a great many scholars has gone into sourcing the vernacular materials, providing a basic picture of how Old English medicine is related, textually, to its classical sources.
The cultural and intellectual relationships at work in this translatio are less clear. What happens when a discourse like medicine, grounded in the materiality of the plants and animals of the Mediterranean, finds itself uprooted from its original cultural context and transplanted to the British Isles? Can Mediterranean remedies put down roots in British soil and go native, or do the plants and animals of the classical tradition function differently for English readers than they would for Latin ones? In other words, how might the transmission of a discourse like medicine alter its fundamental status: as knowledge, as authority, and as practice?