Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 312

Margaret Willes’ The domestic herbal: Plants for the home in the seventeenth century is beautiful to behold. The book charts the use of plants in domestic contexts in the early modern period, elegantly illustrated by rich and varied botanical drawings, portraits, woodcuts from conduct manuals and photographs of vases and other artefacts. The book is intended to be structured as a ‘tour’ of the seventeenth-century home (p. 55), but chapters take activities of household management rather than spaces as their focus. Willes tells us about feeding, brewing, making oneself beautiful and healthy, clothing family members, and furnishing bedrooms.

The domestic herbal is primarily interested in England although island colonies in the Americas and West Indies and some parts of Europe are included too. Willes’ main evidence is printed herbals (alphabetical lists of plants and their culinary and medicinal properties) and household management manuals, both of which boomed in this period. The domestic herbal has its own ‘domestic herbal’ spliced between the chapters on brewing beer and health and beauty, listing 50 herbs that were used by ‘seventeenth-century housewives’ (p. 112). Despite the slightly jarring placement in the middle of the book rather than as an appendix at the end, it is this herbal which one imagines readers will most enjoy. By guiding one through one’s own reading of contemporary texts of the period, Willes helps to defamiliarize herbs that are now commonplace like rosemary, marjoram and thyme, and familiarize those that are not, like tormentil, used to cure colic in calves and children.

Willes convincingly makes the case for the garden and gardening being at the centre of life in the seventeenth century in England and elsewhere, perhaps best encapsulated by John Worlidge’s description of the pleasure, culinary, medicinal and ornamental gardens of England’s nobility, shopkeepers and cottagers (p. 1). Plants decorated, flavoured food; brewed and distilled; scented rooms; made and washed linen; dyed cloth; warded off pests; were used to celebrate births, deaths and marriages; and cured major illnesses and discomforts. Gardening for the purpose of food and medicine was an activity that the loftiest aristocrats and the poorest villagers both engaged in. Perhaps the biggest innovation of the book is in its treatment of the use of plants to furnish and environ the home. Clean air was central to early modern understandings of getting and staying healthy. As a result, we learn that the floor of homes was often strewn with fragrant herbs, rushes and sedge. A delightful quote from the popular conduct writer Hannah Woolley’s The queene-like closet or rich cabinet (1675) about how to decorate fireplaces during summer with live moss, festooned with snails, wild mushrooms and flowers is truly transfixing. ‘The flowers you must renew each week, the moss will last all summer till it will be time to make a fire’ (p. 200).

The theme of labour runs right through the book implicitly. Willes tells us that St Thomas’ Hospital in London hired herb women to tend to medicinal gardens. Whilst an apothecary was paid £60 per year in 1629, a surgeon received £35, a doctor £30 and the herb women that provided all of the raw materials for medicines and ointments only received £4 (p. 51). The book points to the stratification of knowledge systems along traditional gendered lines with housewives doing much of the work to transform plants into materials to feed, clothe and care for family members. And yet, I felt that yet more could have been done to explore the frictions between gendered ways of knowing about and doing things with plants. Herb women were valuable enough to be employed right across the City of London in the seventeenth century, and yet few make it into the works of John Gerard or Gervase Markham, the latter of whom positioned themselves as practical and intellectual experts. For many women lower down the social scale, the seventeenth century fashions in interior decorating and new luxurious drinks like julep, coffee, tea and chocolate, all from plants and colonial expansion, had little practical impact on their herbal knowledge and the way they employed it in their work.

Willes has constructed an engaging and aesthetically beautiful account of homes and plants in early modern England, and parts of Europe, that will be enjoyed by many readers. Given the emphasis on art and material culture, it would have been beneficial to engage more critically with these aspects. The scanty referencing, obviously advantageous in ease of reading for a non-expert, trade audience, also made it difficult to contextualize and understand the beautiful woodcuts from herbals. Given that the book is a ‘tour’, I wondered whether including the plans landowners created of their domains might have helped to tie space to practice more firmly. Given Willes’ expertise in the history of botany and gardening, I wondered what the overarching argument was, not as essential in trade publications as in purely academic, but nonetheless welcome. The book concludes by noting that much of the evidence about plants and botany comes from ‘the more affluent members of society’, and yet Willes has done considerable work to point out that herbal knowledge was central to all levels of society (p. 205). Perhaps more of a critical engagement with the material culture gestured to in the book and embodied practices of gardening, picking and processing plants would have gone some way to remedy this overreliance on elite accounts. Nevertheless, this book is an enjoyable and welcome introduction to the history of botany and domestic cultures in early modern England.