K. Jane Hughes and Dr. Glen Cooper, Department of History
I originally applied for an ORCA grant in order to further my research toward my Honors thesis — a cultural study of Anglo-Saxon medicine. I realized that I would not be able to create a viable paper on the subject with the limited sources available to me in an already limited field. To this end, I put the money toward BYU’s Direct Enrollment program at Cambridge University, where I would have access to the imposing University Library as well as the chance to work one-on-one with an expert on my subject. This was the most rewarding – and also the most frustrating – use I could have found for the grant money.
Despite having only limited sources available to me in Utah, I had discovered definite trends in the scholarship, and had formatted my argument accordingly. In my grant request as well as my thesis proposal I had explained my intended argument: that the largely superstitious nature of Anglo-Saxon medicine was due to failings on the part of the two dominant philosophies of the time, classicism and Catholicism. My focus was thus broad, cultural, and negative.
I had already made significant progress with this argument before Cambridge, relying primarily on the earlier scholars in my (extremely small) subject area. So when I arrived in England and was assigned a mentor, my plan was mainly to bulk out and fine-tune the work I had already done.
By the end of my second week, that plan had completely evaporated. My mentor, Peter Jones, had assigned me a book by Anne VanArsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies. In addition to a new and incredibly superior translation of an Old English medical text, the book launched a vitriolic – if accurate – attack on the early scholars I had relied on so extensively. I read with increasing interest and dismay as Van Arsdall systematically demolished nearly every one of my arguments, with reference to works and writers I had never even heard of.
To say I was overwhelmed would be something of an understatement.
I spent the next month reading my way through every book the University Library could offer on early medieval medicine. I managed to broaden the scope of my knowledge so much that I soon realized I would have to change the focus of my thesis entirely.
By the end of the Cambridge program, I had narrowed my studies to the area of ritual herbal harvesting – the methods of calling upon or enhancing a plant’s latent powers. However, I was still very interested in my original focus, the cultural aspects of medicine. I managed to merge the two into a perspective that is surprisingly absent from all previous studies: I began to look at medical rituals from an Anglo-Saxon’s point of view, instead of from a modern scholar’s.
This proved more difficult than one might think. It required me to set aside modern definitions of “magic,” especially as the concept relates to science and religion. I ended up devoting a great deal of space in my thesis to a section on the “Definition of Terms,” in order to enable my readers to see apparently superstitious, baseless remedies as plausible or at least reasonable – the way they would have appeared to an Anglo-Saxon. I then went on to examine the most common types of harvest ritual, and to speculate on the motivations for their practice.
This meant that the body of the paper did not fit into my preferred format – that is, building up an argument point by point. Rather, I proved the rationality of Anglo-Saxon medicine through cumulative evidence. More important, however – at least in my opinion – was the light that speculation shed on the Anglo-Saxon mindset. By examining the possible reasoning behind common rituals, I was also forced to examine upon all the social factors that influenced learning and logic in early medieval England. This subject has often been studied from a scholastic perspective, but by examining the applications of early medieval philosophy I gained a much clearer sense of the beliefs that the Anglo-Saxons considered most useful or efficacious.
As far as I know, this is a unique approach to the study of Anglo-Saxon culture. I hope to present it as such in my upcoming Honors thesis defense, and to further encourage this approach by publishing a condensed version of my research in the History department’s scholarly journal, the Thetean.
For these and more personal reasons, I believe my research and my use of ORCA’s generous grant were worthwhile. I must admit my topic to be obscure: only a long-standing interest in British history and a family tradition of herbalism could have pointed me toward it. But I feel that its very anonymity enabled originality, not only in its own small field but in the much larger field of medieval studies. Besides this, the discipline and specificity that this paper demanded of me exceeded anything I have previously worked on. I grew much closer to my mentor, Professor Cooper, than I have to any instructor. He encouraged me to stretch further than I had ever believed I would be able – or even willing – to attempt. On the whole, the experience was a brilliant growing opportunity and, I hope, a useful contribution to my department.