Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 225

“EYRSILFR DRUKKIT, ÞAT GERIR BANA” 223
naturalistic and religious approaches to healing appear as complementary.
This mirrors the prevailing contemporary attitudes in Europe. Katharine
Park observes that in Europe, a diverse range of healing practices coexist-
ed, including religious, supernatural, and naturalistic methods.64 A healer
could be any knowledgeable individual, male or female, including fam-
ily members and priests – a diversity that one would expect in medieval
Iceland as well. Monks and nuns are well documented as healers in Europe
during this time, as medicine was integrated into the broader learned cul-
ture in monastic and cathedral schools – although these were replaced to
an increasing degree in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by secular
medical practitioners.65
The text recommends the use of some plants that are not native to
Iceland, which raises the question of how the users of the medical books
would be able to follow some of its advice. Apothecaries, where ingredi-
ents for healing were sold, were a blooming business in medieval urban
Europe, and the earliest record of a “pepperer” in England dates from the
late twelfth century.66 It is not inconceivable that medical ingredients were
imported to Iceland to some extent, along with the wax, honey, wine, oil,
balsam, incense, and other goods imported for the church and the lifestyles
of aristocrats,67 as well as some of the ink and pigments used for manu-
script production.68 The text of 655 xxx recommends the use of some
of these churchly ingredients, such as myrrh, incense, oil, and balsam, as
well as honey.69 Some of the plants may have been cultivated in Iceland.
Archaeological evidence combined with pollen analysis and ethnobotanical
findings at twelve monastic sites in Iceland has revealed that there were
64 Katharine Park, “Medical Practice,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. David C.
Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 616–617.
65 Ibid. See also, on this development, Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 17–47.
66 See Park, “Medical Practice,” 618–620; Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine,
18–20. On the Gilda Piperarorium in England, see T. D. Whittet, “Pepperers, Spicers and
Grocers – Forerunners of the Apothecaries,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 61.8
(1968).
67 Helgi Þorláksson, “Frá landnámi til einokunar,” in Líftaug landsins. Saga íslenskrar
utanlandsverslunar 900-2010, ed. Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson (Reykjavík: Háskóli Íslands,
Sagnfræðistofnun; Skrudda, 2017), 112–116.
68 Soffía Guðmundsdóttir and Laufey Guðnadóttir, “Book Production in the Middle Ages,”
51–53.
69 See Appendix below, articles no. 44, 30, 46, 3, 14, 29, and 37, respectively.