Hybrid Healing

Hybrid creatures emerging from the pages of Old English medical texts readily capture the modern imagination. A potent medicinal root is rendered with distinctly human arms and legs; a swarm charm addresses bees as valkyrie-like beings, at once both natural and mythical. Yet the most powerful forms of hybridity in the Old English healing tradition often result from more subtle mergings: Latin and vernacular, liturgical and folkloric, oral and written. Hybrid healing seeks to meet such textual hybridity with a methodological hybridity of its own. Drawing from a range of fields including plant biology, folkloristics, and disability studies among others, a series of close readings examines selected Old English medical texts through individually tailored combinations of approaches. They are designed to illustrate how the healing power of these remedies ultimately derives from unique convergences of widely disparate traditions and influences. This case-study model positions readers to appreciate more fully the various forces at work in any given remedy, replacing reductive assumptions that have often led early medieval medicine to be dismissed as mere superstition. By inviting readers to approach each text with appropriately diverse critical frameworks, Hybrid healing opens a space to engage the medieval healing tradition with empathy, understanding, and imagination.