Wholeness, Holiness, and Wondrous Healing: Wellness and Formulaic Performativity in the Anglo-Saxon Herbal Healing Guides

Sitting inauspiciously in chapter 92, almost directly in the middle of the late 10th^/early 11th-century Lacnunga Manuscript, is a straightforward remedy for chest pain: “Gif þin heorte ace, nim ribban ד wyl on meolce, drinc nygon morgenas, þe bið sona sel” (“If your heart should ache, take ribwort and boil it in milk; drink it for nine mornings; soon it will be better for you.”). Taken at face value, the medical prescription offered here is unsatisfying if not outright disquieting in its lack of detail. For the symptom of an aching heart could reflect something as benignly discomforting as indigestion, or, as a seasoned healer from any era would likely recognize, it could suggest the conditions known today as acute myocardial infarction (i.e., the sudden death of cardiac tissue) or pulmonary embolism (a cardiac blood clot), or some other dire and potentially life-threatening medical plight. Moreover, even as modern science confirms the traditionally-recognized medical efficacy of ribwort ‒ even today, a fairly proliferate plant¹ ‒ any set of symptoms lasting for as long as nine days ‒ the length of time within which the dosage of milk and ribwort (plantago lanceolata) is prescribed ‒ would likewise suggest a condition more enduring and serious than one causing routine discomfort. Finally, while the hoped-for outcome ‒ a vaguely quick return to “wellness” as the anticipated result of the treatment ‒ is stated directly (to the implied patient) and with such confident brevity, the prescription disturbingly omits any description of any process or stages of recovery over that nine day period, thus further arousing the suspicions of modern readers about the treatment’s efficacy. It is also noteworthy, then, that some version of that inscrutably optimistic phrase (“sona bið þe sel”) appears in eighteen separate instances across the manuscript as a whole.