ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the herbs and the herbal healing that are satirized in the Middle English texts. 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. Lengthier and more complex satire is found in an inserted scene in the late fifteenth-century East Anglian Play of the Sacrament. The setting of this comic scene can be localized in East Anglia. Although the scribal dialect of the text is Anglo-Irish, beneath it a layer of dialect can be identified with Norfolk, both on the basis of orthography and on place names in the scene. Pertelote lists the kinds of dreams caused by a superfluity of melancholy, citing Cato on the meaninglessness of dreams, and then offers an herbal remedy for Chauntecleer's frightening dreams.
