"Through an analysis of twenty-four examples of female-owned herbals supplemented by case studies of the herbal references in the writings of Margaret Hoby, Grace Mildmay, Elizabeth Isham, and Isabella Whitney, Rebecca Laroche seeks to uncover the myriad ways that women engaged herbal texts along with the multiple contexts of their usage. She investigates the texts for their practical value, rather than as reference texts to help modern scholars understand allusions in early modern literary works.

"Her work is firmly within the revisionist critique of the concept of the medical marketplace and the tripartite division of medical authority into physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, a model that excludes and subjugates women. Beginning with an examination of herbals written by men, she shows how these intentionally authoritative and comprehensive texts aimed to bring a more complete herbal knowledge to a projected audience of learned men, and to masculinize the herbal tradition. John Parkinson, for example, produced two books on herbals: one for women that demonstrated the delights to be found in plants and one for men that incorporated more intellectual debates and medicinal remedies. The published herbals, through their construction of the female reader, attempted to limit the medical activities of women, but the extensive information they supplied enabled gentlewomen in particular to acquire considerable medical knowledge" (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/522314, accessed 05-2018).