Alongside the publication of my book, in 2019-20 I spent a pleasant few months conducting research on a selection of the herbals and regimen books held in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, as part of the Rylands-sponsored ‘Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World’ project. Sleep, specifically the cultural construction of sleep paralysis, has formed the backbone of my research for years, so I was thrilled to explore what the Rylands archives had to offer in terms of the remedies employed to ensure a good night’s rest. Thomas Paynell’s glossed commentary of the Regimen sanitatis Salerni (1528), Gerard of Cremona’s translation of the Canon of Medicine, (1595) and John Gerard’s compendious Herbal (1597) were just some of the works I had the pleasure of consulting.
In May I wrote a blog post for the John Rylands Research Institute (JRRI) that summarised my time on this project, so I don’t really want to re-hash things here. For the JRRI blog I used the library’s copy of A Boke of the Propertes of Herbes (1548; fig. 1) as the main case study; an entryway into the fascinating realms of medieval sleep science. The Boke is an exceedingly rare edition of Banckes’ Herball (1525), famous for being the earliest extant herbal printed in England. It is not the most academic or comprehensive of herbals, but provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between the academic traditions of humoural medicine and folk beliefs surrounding the healthful properties of plants. You can read my thoughts on the soporific remedies contained in the Boke of the Propertes, and how they relate to the wider traditions of herbal lore and humoural theory, here: ‘thou shalt slepe well’: Provoking Sleep in the First English Printed Herbal.
Supernatural Histories 