Edition and translation of the Old English Herbarium, British Library Cotton MS Vitellius C iii, the only illustrated Anglo-Saxon medical text, dating from about 1000 CE, containing information on 185 medicinal plants, the names of conditions for which they are beneficial, and directions for making remedies with them. This text was previously translated inaccurately by Cockayne (No. 6534). For a facsimile edition of the manuscript see No. 8889.

"The Herbarium, attributed wrongly to Apuleius Platonicus, was one of a number of Old English Texts--occupying some thousand manuscript pages--that mark the first flowering of vernacular medical writing in medieval Europe. It is an expanded version of a late Roman tratise that survives in Old English in four manuscripts, one of them strikingly illustrated (British Library Cotton MSS, Vitellius C. iii). This text is by no means a mindless translation of mediterranean herbal remedies; rather it displays practical knowledge of plants widely available in Anglo-Saxon England through cultivation and import. Van Arsdall adds to our understanding of the uses of this text by drawing on present-day curandera practices in the south-western United States. She makes the cogent argument that texts like the Old English Herbarium served as aide-mémoire for the apprenticeship system that trains traditional healers" (from the Foreward by Linda Ehrsam Voigts, p. x).