ABSTRACT
As we have come to see the way that the English herbal tradition increasingly acknowledged the gentlewoman reader-at the same time that it may have sought to delimit her practice-we now turn to the numerous instances in which we can determine that women owned these same volumes. Specifically, cases of early modern women’s ownership of the authoritative herbals by William Turner, Rembert Dodoens, John Gerard, and John Parkinson examined in the previous chapter serve as our subjects of inquiry in this chapter. By “ownership” I mean not only the material possession of an item within the household but also the claim to the knowledge held in the book. In asserting ownership, women positioned the volume within the household, potentially articulating their role within that household as healer. They did not subscribe only to the uses of herbs designated for women: all of the textual knowledge was open before the women who owned the herbals. These women were as likely to use rue to stop a nosebleed as to end a pregnancy, and while Anne Wilbraham’s cure for the ague using docks discussed in Chapter 1 is available to them, John Bennet’s much more aggressive treatment resided on the same page. And even though the learned gentlewoman with a charitable practice was the female reader preferred by the herbal author, any woman with English literacy and the requisite moneys could own this knowledge. The nature of these books as volumes to be used determined that these women did not own the herbals simply for their own solitary edification. In signifying ownership of an authoritative herbal, these women also gave evidence of the various “social networks” to which they belonged and the cultural influences to which they were subject.1 Herbal ownership thus proves to mean many things across households and between individuals, and delineating the variations between the examples of ownership further demonstrates how Englishwomen’s herbal texts may point to social variables and individual realities beyond a general and monolithic medical practice by women.
