Philobiblon

Off to a medieval talk at the IHR tonight. It was supposed to be about biographies (which ties in with several things I’m working on at the moment), but that was cancelled so instead it was an entertaining account of an obscure German text of 1551, On the Healing of Magical Illnesses by Bartholomaeus Carrichter, a physician of no known education dismissed by the qualified men of Vienna as an “empiric”, although associated in the mind of many at the time with Paracelsus (and translated into three languages and being reprinted into the 18th century). The talk was by Catherine Rider of Christ’s College Cambridge.

She said that most of his 30 or so recipes didn’t have an identifiable written source, suggesting they might be fairly widely held popular remedies. What is curious about it is that before providing cures, Carrichter presents a detailed account of the witches’ methods – one interesting thought is that this is a covert witches’ manual.

There’s certainly some folk echoes in this one: “The witches prick a pretty apple with a needle, with which a dead person has been sewn into their shroud, and then straight away drip the juice of oxtongue plant into the holes they have made, and keep the apple with them until the holes have dried up by themselves, and they cannot be seen. Afterward they present the apple to a maiden or woman”. Sleeping Beauty anyone?

Lots of the cures are for impotence, and I have a feeling the Freudians might have something to say about them – the afflicted man should “pull a stick out of a hedge, sit down on the ground and lay his penis in the hole, where the stick has been pulled out, and urinate into it. Then he should stand up, put the stick that he has pulled back in the hole, and pray to God that he will be healed.”