ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we saw how the general signifier “herbal” moves from the more specific “Gerard’s herbal” or “Parkinson’s herbal” to the very specific signification “Elizabeth Bagot’s herbal” or “Anne Whitehall’s herbal” and how, with this last layer of designation, the text may be located not only in time/ geography but within a social network as well. In this chapter, the herbal gains an even more refined location within certain life-narratives, giving it a place geographically, temporally, and socially as well as instilling it with multivalent narrative significance. The autobiographical context that provides a sense of patient and practitioner (sometimes one and the same) and remedy and disease gives narrative weight to the herbs themselves. So while Parkinson tells his female reader in the Paradisus that crane’s bill is good for salving wounds, Lady Margaret Hoby, when confronted by a severe cut on a workman’s leg, reads an herbal for just such a remedy. When Lady Grace Mildmay reads Turner’s herbal and discovers that betony is good for the eyes, she combines it with other such simples to make her own unique eye medicine. When Elizabeth Isham’s sister Judith suffers from melancholia and an agitated and weak heart, Elizabeth makes her a conserve from borage, which we find from the herbals is imbued with curative qualities for such ailments. Thus crane’s bill, betony, and borage-all of which have other uses-have particular purpose with relation to the respective narratives. Similarly, the herbals as texts represented in these narratives come to have particular signification.
