ABSTRACT
Satire of a cultural practice is one measure of it as a popular and widely known phenomenon. Among the surviving vernacular writings of late medieval England are texts satirizing the use of herbs, primarily in medicines, often by quack doctors and would-be healers. Three texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witness to the entertainment value for medieval English audiences of parodies of the practice of herbal medicine. The best-known examples of such comic treatment come from the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13431400), written for literate Londoners, but such entertainment was not restricted to elite readers like Chaucer’s audience. Other less sophisticated instances can be identified from a rural area in the West Midlands, c. 1465-70, and in a comic scene of a doctor and his servant interpolated in the late fifteenth-century East Anglian miracle drama e Play of the Sacrament.
