RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Gender and the ‘Natural’ Environment in the Middle Ages

Series Editors

Denis Renevey (Université de Lausanne)

Diane Watt (University of Surrey)

Editorial Board

Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London)

Jean-Claude Schmitt (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Fiona Somerset (Duke University)

Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Gender and the ‘Natural’ Environment in the Middle Ages

edited by

THERESA L. TYERS AND PATRICIA SKINNER

© The Contributors, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-83772-057-6

eISBN 978-1-83772-059-0

The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: MS. Bodl. 602, fol. 34r, Mermecolion, Pearl Oyster, Virgin and Child © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Foreword

Laura Kalas

Introduction: Considering Nature

Theresa L. Tyers and Patricia Skinner

WOMEN’S SPACES

1Intersections of [Un]Nature, Power and [Dis]Order: the Presentation of Elite Women in Medieval Chronicles Linda E. Mitchell

2Gendering Treatment: Cupping by Female Practitioners in Late Medieval Visual Culture Jennifer Borland

3Fracturing Boundaries: Domesticity and Agricultural Practices in a Late Fourteenth-Century Manuscript Theresa L. Tyers

4Distilling Nature: Raw Materials, ‘Artificial’ Remedies and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages Elma Brenner

QUEER BODIES

5Recreating the ‘Natural World’: the Medieval Oyster and her Pearl Diane Heath

6Amazed and Ravished in the Medieval Garden: the Space of Lesbian Desire in The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leafe Michelle M. Sauer

7Monstrous Hybrids, Maternal Sin and the Concept of Species in Nicole Oresme’s De causis mirabilium Tess Wingard

Bibliography

Notes

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine, and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 Cupping by woman practitioner: Le Régime du corps , c. 1285. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arsenal 2510, fol. 13v, detail. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

2.2 Cautery scenes and cupping administered by a woman: surgical treatises, c .1400. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Laud Misc. MS 724, fol. 96r. Photo Bodleian Libraries.

2.3 Vessels for cupping: Paneth Codex, c .1300. Yale Medical Library, MS 28, fol. 300v, detail. Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

2.4 Scene of cupping: Le Régime du corps , c .1265–70. British Library MS Sloane 2435, fol. 14r, detail © the British Library Board.

2.5 The story of Aesculapius and Asclepius: medical treatise, c .1425–50. British Library MS Sloane 6, fol. 175v. © the British Library Board.

2.6 Scenes of cupping, administered by a woman: medical treatise, c .1425–50. British Library MS Sloane 6, fol. 177r. © the British Library Board.

2.7 Scenes of cupping, administered by a woman: medical treatise, c .1425–50. British Library MS Sloane 6, fol. 177v. © the British Library Board.

2.8 Cautery scenes: surgical treatises, c .1400. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Laud Misc. MS 724, fol. 95v. Photo Bodleian Libraries.

2.9 Scenes of cupping, administered by a woman: surgical treatises, c .1400. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Laud Misc. MS 724, fol. 96v. Photo Bodleian Libraries.

2.10 Labour scene, fetus-in-utero images: surgical treatises, c .1400. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Laud Misc MS 724, fol. 97r. Photo Bodleian Libraries.

6.1 Sample maze plans (here called ‘labyrinths’) from The Gardeners Labyrinth by John Wolfe (London, 1586). Volume housed in Dumbarton Oakes Research Library and Collection (Washington DC); used with permission. Image © Michelle M. Sauer, 2016.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to express their gratitude to Laura Kalas and Liz Herbert McAvoy for their support and encouragement during the lengthy process of bringing this volume to publication, to all the contributors who persevered in challenging times to complete their chapters, and to the University of Wales Press for their understanding as our deadline slipped multiple times. We also acknowledge those speakers at the Gender and Medieval Studies conference in Swansea in 2020 whose work does not appear here but greatly enriched our thinking on the subject of gender, science and the ‘natural’ world.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jennifer Borland is Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Oklahoma State University. Specialising in medieval European visual culture, she has published on topics including medical imagery, gender, materiality, collecting and medievalism. She is the author of Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps (2022), and is a managing editor of the open access journal Different Visions. She is the recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of Pennsylvania, and served as the Lynette Autrey Visiting Scholar at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center.

Elma Brenner is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection, London, and co-editor of Social History of Medicine. Her publications include Leprosy and charity in medieval Rouen (2015) and Leprosy and identity in the Middle Ages: from England to the Mediterranean (co-edited with François-Olivier Touati, 2021). She is a convener of the working group on Medieval European Medical Manuscripts of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Diane Heath graduated from University of Kent in 2016 with a PhD on the role of bestiaries in medieval monastic culture. She is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has co-edited the Gender and Medieval Studies open access collection Gender: Places, Spaces and Liminalities (2019), and is general editor with Victoria Blud for the University of Wales series Medieval Animals.

Linda E. Mitchell is the Emerita Martha Jane Phillips Starr Missouri Distinguished Endowed Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Emerita Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In addition to a career as the editor of the journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques for fifteen years, her most recent monograph is Joan de Valence: The Life and Influence of a Thirteenth-Century Noblewoman (2017). She is currently completing a project for Brill titled The Marshal Consanguinity: Kinship, Affinity, and the Creation of a Socio-Political Network, 1190–1400. She is also a past president of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and has served on the Gender and Medieval Studies steering committee.

Michelle M. Sauer is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND). She specialises in Middle English language and literature, especially women’s devotional literature and monastic texts, and publishes regularly on anchoritism, mysticism, asceticism, hagiography, queer/ gender theory, spatial theory, monasticism and Church history. Her publications include the books Celebrating St Albert and His Rule: Rules, Devotion, Orthodoxy, and Dissent (with Kevin Alban, 2018), Gender in Medieval Culture (2015), The Lesbian Premodern (with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney, 2011), How to Write about Chaucer (2009) and The Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (2008), as well as articles appearing in journals such as Gender and History and Journal of the History of Sexuality. Current projects include the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Global Women’s Literature, the Companion to Sexuality in the Medieval West (ARC Humanities), an edition of the Wooing Group, a database of the manuscripts of St Birgitta of Sweden, and numerous pieces on the intersections of gender and space or sexuality and religious expression in medieval Christian devotional and theological texts.

Patricia Skinner held a Personal Chair in History at Swansea University until 2020. She is the author of Studying Gender in Medieval Europe (2018), and co-edited The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation c.1200–1750 (with Theresa Tyers, 2018).

Theresa L. Tyers graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2016 with a PhD thesis that focused on the feminist debate on how women’s medicine was made masculine in the later-medieval period, and the transmission of medical knowledge in the vernacular. She joined Swansea University as an Honorary Research Associate, working as a research assistant for the Leverhulme funded ‘Enclosed Garden’ project led by Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy; the project resulted in a number of publications, including The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation c.1200–1750 (co-edited with Patricia Skinner, 2018). Chapters from her thesis have also been published as articles in Social History of Medicine and Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae. She is currently an Honorary Researcher at Swansea, working on a number of late medieval manuscript-based projects.

Tess Wingard is a Lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York, from where they graduated with a PhD in 2021. Her research focuses on cultural narratives of sexuality, and on how they were shaped by thinking on the binaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, as well as on how these narratives affected lived experience in late medieval Europe. She is currently working on her first monograph, Unclean Beasts: Sex, Animality, and the Invention of Heteronormativity, 1200–1550.

FOREWORD

Laura Kalas

I was snow; I melted and

the Earth drank me.

Then, I became a vapor in the heart of Earth,

rising high to the sky.

(Rumi)1

We must understand in an integral way the roles of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other practices … we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand.

(Karen Barad)2

Since early 2020, science has been waging war on a microcosmic level. We have battled with the physical effects of illness, the emotional effects of loss and isolation, and the stress of adapting to a new world and time. The COVID-19 virus has changed our bodies and beliefs in ways that we are still yet to uncover. As we are witnessing, ‘nature’ morphs, and, as it does, so do cultures, behaviours and relationships, as we push the limits of knowledge and the very ontologies of our human state as a part of a wider picture. The epistemological entanglements of nature, science and culture have become even more starkly evident in our everyday lives, shifting how we live. While the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s changed human sexual behaviours forever, for instance, so the protective face masks necessitated by COVID-19 have also profoundly altered the quotidian nature of human interaction, facial recognition and social mores. ‘Natures’ change. And cultures follow.

The 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies conference, which I had the pleasure of hosting at Swansea University with the unwavering support of Liz Herbert McAvoy, took place just before the moniker of COVID-19 had become an everyday term. Conversely, this volume emerges in the immediate aftermath of the peak of the pandemic, its authors and editors having worked tirelessly in the most challenging of situations to bring to fruition scholarship that is resiliently inflected in ways that none of us could have anticipated. This volume is thus the embodiment of old and new worlds, of pre-pandemic and post-pandemic existence, and is necessarily imbricated in the scientific, medical, cultural, social and ontological shifts in ‘nature’ that are now themselves inscribed in recent history. In exploring questions of the ‘natural’ within the scientific and philosophical systems of the Middle Ages, and the ways in which such models are inflected by gender, race, differently abled bodies or queer phenomena, we are able to situate – albeit hesitantly – the human within medieval understandings of landscape, health, power and desire, and thus reach towards a knowing of what might be at stake through such epistemologies.

‘Nature’, as a mutable and evolving ontology, can, of course, encompass both environmental and individual states of existence. The medieval conceptualisation of ‘natural’ as synonymous with ‘perfect’ – and its inversion – manifests in the binary discourses of world order with which we are so familiar in medieval writings. Ancient and medieval theories of human creation conceived of natural perfection in a intrinsically gendered way; often following Aristotelian paradigms of the ‘natural’ default of life as male (‘Females are weaker and colder in their nature [than males] and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity’).3 In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen had pushed against such dogmas by describing life through a feminised process of natality and viriditas (‘greening’), intimately connecting human generation with its place in the natural environment: ‘By the secret design of the Supernatural Creator … the infant in the maternal womb receives a spirit, and shows by the movements of its body that it lives, just as the earth opens and brings forth the flowers of its use when the dew falls on it.’4 Indeed, while the medieval worldview generally prioritised a God-given schematic order with the human at its centre, illustrations of the universe in scientific and medical manuscripts show an interconnectedness between humanity and the elements, seasons, temperatures and other life forms; an interconnection that, as our own destructive relationship with the planet might attest, has perhaps been lost in the modern zeitgeist.5 While God might be located, too, in the medieval natural world, so the divine ‘nature’ of God might also be harnessed, particularly by the visionary writers of the later Middle Ages who sought union with Christ. In her Dialogo, for example, Catherine of Siena (1347–80) received God’s ordination to change the nature of her being; to strip off her ‘old nature, [her] selfish sensuality’, and be clothed in a ‘new nature, the gentle Christ Jesus’, which is reimagined in the Middle English translation, the Orcherd of Syon, as the removal of her ‘propre sensualyte’ to be ‘arayed wiþ a newe conuersacioun, þat is, Crist Ihesu’.6 The paradox of the removal and modification of a seemingly ‘natural’ state of being for the purposes of spiritual perfection is not lost on the modern reader; but neither is the potentiality, therefore, for multiple and fluid conceptualisations of ‘nature’ itself in the medieval imaginary.

Though ‘nature’ was often construed of as fixed in medieval scientific and medical texts, where the ‘naturals’ and ‘non-naturals’ offered up default models for equilibrium in relation to human health and the environment, so the textual culture of the Middle Ages frequently revealed its concomitant disruption and destabilisation through narratives of possibility and flux. Such a construction of revised narratives, or ‘fabulations’, is something explored by Donna Haraway in her own response to the environmental troubles of the twenty-first century. Calling for the earth’s inhabitants to ‘make kin in lines of inventive connection’ as part of a ‘timeplace’ of the now, of past remembrances, and of the what-might-yet-be, Haraway notes how ‘Nothing makes itself’. In searching for a sympoietic ‘worlding-with’, all beings that will make, or create, new narratives for earthly flourishing, made possible through the dynamic co-operation of the human and nonhuman in ‘moving relations of attunement’ born from listening and understanding our co-inhabitants, create stories made ‘but not made up’, encapsulated in an ‘ongoingness … that enables our living and dying well with each other’. This entanglement of all earthly existents, operating in non-ideological and non-hierarchal ways, and as deeply connected ‘mixed assemblages’, would, according to Haraway, reconcile and reunite ancient, current and future beings of the earth, in a harmonious making-of-kin.7 Such a radical rewriting of the human relationship with the natural world in the past, present, and future is, in fact, already a feature of many texts of the Middle Ages, where new worlds, bodies, behaviours and entanglements are imagined and inscribed. Many of the essays in this volume explore such very narratives of the ‘nature’ of becoming and locating: in medieval ‘wonders’; the landscapes of health care; the space of the oysterwomb; in stones and charms; the discourses of ‘hypernatural’ women and ‘wild’ young wives; and in tangled medieval garden mazes.

What follows is a pioneering study that temporally frames the COVID-19 pandemic in its intellectual production, since its own fabulation has traversed, side by side, the course of the virus. It explores the principles of medieval science as twenty-first century science reassesses its own, evolving knowledge base. The pressing ‘nature’ of the present focus, then, asks us to confront the meanings of our own situated and material existence, approximated by the theoretically fixed, yet all too often diverted, gaze of the medieval past.

Introduction: Considering Nature

THERESA L. TYERS AND PATRICIA SKINNER

The later Middle Ages in Europe, c .1150 to c .1500, can be viewed as an extensive scientific laboratory, with scholars and other writers producing texts that sought to define, and redefine, the gendered human body in relation to its daily work and environment, and to God. Drawing on English and French written and visual evidence from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the present essay collection addresses the relationship between the human and the ‘natural’ at a time when new worlds, new texts and new religious experiences were all on offer to reshape the individual and collective relationship with the cosmos. 1 Contributors were asked to explore how taking a gendered view enabled fresh readings of texts whose purpose, chiefly, was to present the natural ordering of life and/or to educate the reader on how to interact with the natural world. The texts under scrutiny range from historical chronicles with strong ideas of women’s place, to medical and didactic treatises sharing knowledge of the body and environment (and how to manage both), to moralising literary works that presented abstract concepts in human form, to the material and symbolic culture of an inhabitant of the marine environment, the oyster, and a treatise exploring the nature of ‘unnatural’ births that blurred the divide between human and animal. The authorial voices are predominantly male, but the chapters hypothesise alternative voices and readings embedded within the texts. They draw from a range of disciplines and theorised positions, interweaving feminist history with art and medicine, ecocriticism with queer theory that not only unpicks the binary of male/female but also considers how access to knowledge itself was subject to gendered expectations.

Gendered scholarship on the subject of nature is of course nothing new: feminist anthropology of the mid-1970s interrogated the nature/culture divide and initiated a strand of scholarship that fruitfully explores the idea of women’s particular closeness to (and knowledge of) nature and the environment.2 Medievalists’ interest in the subject is evidenced, for example, by the attention paid to ‘greening’ language visible in medieval mystical texts written by female religious.3 Yet the scientific explorations of the thirteenth century onwards focused mainly on making sense of the world through the rediscovery and adaptation of classical metaphysical texts, which sought to describe and explain the cosmos while privileging the masculine.4 The place of nature was understood to serve ‘man’: according to the thirteenth-century surgeon Theoderic of Lucca, for example, the ‘control of natural forces’ was a skill that all good surgeons should have,5 and the anthropomorphic language that developed around Nature notably defined her as female, sacred and nurturing but fickle and unpredictable.6 John Gower’s Visio Anglie, written over a century later, is explicit in celebrating the natural world as offering ‘omni munere prepollens, que sibi poscit homo’ (‘every gift that man needs for himself’) (our emphasis).7 Vernacular texts, too, took up the same theme of nature providing ‘all you need to cure’ in the hedges, byways and fields: foraging is nothing new.8 Taming nature – and the gendered language used to express this activity – runs through many of the works discussed in the chapters of this volume, whether through management of the body, of unwanted visitors in the household, exploiting an estate through agriculture, or imagining multiple garden landscapes ranging from the carefully planted kitchen garden with its seasonal produce, to the installation of pleasure gardens with formal features like a maze and private arbours.9 Unearthing ‘Nature’s secrets’ (the very term redolent of intrusion and violence) was the subject of early writers such as Michael Scot (d. c.1235) and encyclopaedists such as Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264).10 It is a hallmark of the period that acquiring this knowledge was increasingly regulated and exclusive to those schooled in Latin, so that ‘the illiterate but, what is deemed even more horrible, women’ (our emphasis) could be excluded.11

Intellectual enquiry, then, was posited as a predominantly male, and privileged, enterprise, extending a tradition of exclusive misogyny that is visible too in other types of texts, and reinforced by prevailing religious models of women’s fallibility. Knowledge could also be organised through appealing to law – philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) famously subjects human law to ‘natural’ law, arguing that both participate in the eternal laws revealed by the divinity to man.12 For him and other late thirteenth-century intellectuals such as William of Saliceto, the existence and knowledge of general principles needed to underlie any practical education.13 All, however, maintained the strong and enduring belief that all nature was ultimately God’s creation: science and religion co-existed with almost no conflict, and both reinforced ideas of the unpredictable and dangerous nature of women, contrasted with the rational male.14

This male-female binary is strongly in evidence in medieval discussions of the ‘natural’ roles of women. Linda Mitchell’s chapter opens this collection, asking whether politically active women in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were viewed as ‘unnatural’ in their activities or should be understood rather as ‘hypernatural’, in that their irrational involvement in men’s affairs (in the eyes of the chroniclers describing them) was only to be expected because they were women. Mitchell demonstrates that the misogynist version of events present in the chronicles (themselves products of the same, Latinate tradition) has all too readily been accepted and rehearsed by modern historians, despite alternative and supplementary versions of female agency being accessible through fiscal and other records. This extension of female authority into a masculine environment was by no means uncontested, as Mitchell’s chapter demonstrates, and female penetration into roles of leadership is still a difficult topic for some corners of the medieval academy (lower case) even today.

The need to control women also featured in Elizabeth Kinne’s important contribution to the 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies conference. Kinne brought a fresh perspective to the well-known fourteenth-century conduct books known by their authors the Ménagier de Paris and the Knight of La Tour Landry. She utilised Foucault’s idea of the technology of the self to ask whether these texts serve as ‘a means of self-fulfilling transcendence, or rather as merely misogynistic forms of control wielded over young wives who are encouraged to tame their wild natures at the expense of their own subjectivities’.15 That is, were the intended readers simply to be moulded as the objects of conduct literature produced by men – a common interpretation of these texts – or was the knowledge found in these texts a tool of empowerment?16

A similar question arises when we consider the purpose of illustrations in didactic medical texts. Jennifer Borland’s contribution to the present volume examines how women care-givers were depicted in images of medical practice. Comparing several late medieval depictions of cupping that show the procedure conducted by female practitioners, she considers how these different examples demonstrate a complex and changing depiction of the landscape of health care in the later Middle Ages. This process, like blood-letting, was carried out at specific sites and times for specific purposes, requiring knowledge to carry out the process properly.17 As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen comments, medievalists have long known and written about the interpenetration of the human surface with external factors and forces,18 evidenced by medieval medicine’s understanding of the impact of ‘naturals’ (the balance of bodily humours) and ‘non-naturals’ (external factors such as environment, but also the subject’s physical and mental activities) on the health of the human body.19 Borland’s chapter, like Mitchell’s, considers the question of women’s incursion into a predominantly male environment, this time that of the surgeon, and the possibilities of gaining authority through knowledge of this very intimate bodily practice. Was the depiction of women as practitioners a tacit acknowledgement of their existing role, or might it also point to female readers, encouraged to take on such tasks?

Borland’s chapter compares texts from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The period in between saw an explosion of ‘science’ to include empirical and rational knowledge of the universe and how it worked, gained through direct study and observation. The influence of the encyclopaedists was sustained through translation into vernacular languages (e.g., John of Trevisa’s English translation of Bartholomaeus),20 but as scholarly dialectics strove towards increasing clarity, there was a concomitant flourishing of poetic and visionary texts that sought to take the author and readers beyond the logical and literal, and to imagine different worlds. The human capacity to imagine was itself explored in diagrammatic form.21 The breaching of Latinity and the spread of knowledge in the vernacular in this period added a further experimental layer, as texts were mined, combined, translated and reshaped into new collections, often including entirely spurious attributions to named ‘authorities’, for the use of an increasingly literate (non-Latin) laity. The intertextuality of such compilations is striking, as religious texts were employed, for example, to bolster the efficacy of medical remedies, and observations of the natural world shaped calendars of activity through the year and attributed particular qualities to different plants, animals and inanimate objects such as precious and semi-precious stones.22 The catalyst for at least some of this activity was the seismic catastrophe of the Great Plague