Which Plants? The Limits of Reading It as Pharmacy

A charm that names nine plants invites the question of what they were, and there have been many attempts to answer it, some of them keen to show that the remedy would have worked. The attempt runs into a hard limit. Old English plant names do not map cleanly onto modern species. A name may cover several plants, or may have shifted its reference between the writing of one manuscript and another, and the medical manuscripts themselves are not consistent.

Some of the nine are secure enough. Mucgwyrt is mugwort and wegbrade is the plant still called waybread or plantain; fille and finule are generally taken as chervil and fennel. Others are not. Maegde is usually identified with mayweed or camomile and attorlathe, whose name means poison-loather, has attracted several proposals without settling on one. Stune and wergulu have no agreed identification at all, and the atlas records that as an open gap rather than adopting a guess.

The consequence is that the charm cannot be assessed as pharmacology, and treating it that way misdescribes it in any case. Each plant is addressed and told what it can do. The remedy operates by speech directed at the plant as much as by anything the plant contains, and a modern account that keeps only the botany has removed the part the text spends most of its words on.