Curth, Louise Hill. ‘A Plaine and Easie Waie to Remedie a Horse’: Equine Medicine in Early Modern England. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. 274pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-22394-3. $150 cloth.
This monograph is a humane monograph, a book filled with serious learning, challenging assertions and convincing argument. The basic aim is to complicate our understanding of early modern veterinary practices. Curth believes that there is a general consensus that ‘proper’ care of animals, particularly of horses, began only in 1791 with the founding of the London Veterinary College. The assumption is that so-called horse-healing of previous eras was characterised by shoddy guesswork, magic, and amateurish dabbling. Horses were too important economically and socially to be treated shoddily or casually, Curth insists. It is a compelling argument, and Curth does much to dignify the myriad writers and practitioners who dedicated time to furthering horse health in the centuries prior to 1791. Unfortunately, the book is marred by repetition, occasionally weak prose and excessive self-citation. More problematically, the presentation of the book is seriously botched. Innumerable errors get in the way of one’s engagement with Curth’s important arguments: references are mangled, punctuation is erratic, words and even clauses are missing, typos abound and dating errors proliferate. In this review I will address every chapter of the monograph because Curth’s work is an important contribution to the now massive interdisciplinary field of critical animal studies.
The Introduction does a lot of useful things: the importance of the growing academic interest in animals is accounted for; useful terms for equine medicine/hippiatry are defined and established; the importance of the Company of Farriers to early modern horse health is stressed; and the contents of the eight following chapters are introduced. There is a strange early contradiction though: on page 2 we are told that ‘Modern historians, however, still generally appear to have little interest in early modern horses’. On the next page, though, in one of the first of many references to her own work, Curth asserts that ‘my articles, book chapters and my monograph, The Care of Brute Beasts… have raised a great deal of interest in this topic’ (3). Is there ‘little interest’ or a ‘great deal of interest’?
The meat of the book emerges in Chapter One. Here the focus is on ancient equine medicine, particularly on ancient Greece where the roots of modern human and animal medicine may be found. Curth looks back even before then to imagine animals dealing with health without humans. Movingly, Curth reflects on the crude ways in which animals try to self-heal and reflects on the probability that animal health declined as they became more dependant on and bound to humans as humans settled into permanent home lifestyles. The argument that domesticated animals are less able to self-medicate is compelling. Curth moves onto ancient Greek writing on horses and their health – indeed, this section of the book works very well as an introduction to Greek writing on horsemanship. I was unconvinced by Curth’s professed belief that the supposed writer of Mulomedicina Chironis, Chiron, was a real historical person rather than a mythical originator of a text (in some ancient sources, amusingly, it is declared that Chiron was a half-man, half-horse entity). We are brought through the horse-related thinking of the canonical Greeks – Simon of Athens, Xenophon, Aristotle and, crucially Galen and Vegetius. The importance of the theory of humours is stressed. This is important because Curth points out that the prolific early modern writer on horses, Gervase Markham, was largely influenced by these ancient theories and insisted that they were as applicable to animals as they were to humans. Every chapter finishes with a conclusion of some two or three pages. I think that this is unnecessary: it simply repeats, briefly, everything that has been said before. The chapter has been outlined in the Introduction, Curth, responsibly, tells us again what she will do in the chapter at the start of each one, then does the thing in the meat of the chapter, and then repeats it again in the ‘Conclusion’. This book, important as its findings are, could have been thirty pages shorter if such repetition had been avoided.
Chapter Two, which focuses on medieval horse care, is enjoyable simply because of its sheer ambition. The chapter deals with three main areas: the relevance of Christianity to thinking on horse health; the role of magic in the field; and a description of the many influential manuscripts that circulated before the invention of the printing press. If we ignore many typographical errors the chapter is a great read. Close links between horse healing and medieval hagiographic cults are brought to life. I learnt many stories that I was hitherto unaware of. For example, St. Wulfstan reputedly healed a discoloured, swollen horse belonging to one Eustace of Powick; St. Eligius managed to re-attach a detached leg to a stricken horse; and St. Patrick supposedly resurrected a man and his horse. It is also pointed out that in medieval pilgrimages horses were inevitable participants – against their expressed will, of course. Crucially, medieval Christian writers, despite resolute anthropocentrism, believed that as horses were God-given, they must be subject to respect and care. It is a useful antidote to casual assumptions about allegedly reckless, allegedly ignorant pre-1791 approaches to animal welfare.
Curth also points out that the worlds of ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ were not necessarily incompatible during the many centuries of the post-Classical, pre-modern age. All sorts of charms and herbs were whimsically applied to fend off disease and injury for animals – but a few words in a text could render ambiguous any religious or superstitious flavour. The remainder of the chapter addresses the many relevant manuscripts of the period. The fact that over two-hundred known copies of a fifteenth-century Little Book of Horse Remedies by a German farrier, Albrecht, are extant underlines that healing horses in the pre-modern age was widespread, was serious, was discussed and was thought about deeply by interested parties. It is, finally, pointed out that horse healing manuscripts in the later middle ages from England are invariably written in the vernacular. These manuscripts, it seems, are designed for the immediate acquisition of practical knowledge, not for theoretical scholarship. Healing horses to extend their working lives was an everyday necessity for everyday people; that is why the study of these manuscripts is so important for us as we reflect on the complexities and importance of pre-modern veterinary practices.
The third chapter deals with equine medicine in the early modern period. It is wide-ranging and probably too ambitious, but it is full of interesting, sometimes ravishing, detail. Curth, sensibly, if hardly originally, decides that the early modern period began with the invention of the mechanical printing press in the 1400s. The first main section addresses the characteristics of horse healers of the period. Many important terms are addressed illuminatingly – farrier, marshal, blacksmith, farrier etc. Of crucial relevance to Curth’s work is the London Company of Farriers, an organisation founded in 1356. Curth underlines the professionalism of this body, describing their importance as equine health consultants to well-to-do English families and describing their apprentices’ gruelling seven-year training period. One brief section addresses the status of magic healers in the period – neither despised nor automatically scoffed at, such healers could be used as a last resort. A more substantial section on pharmaceuticals follows. Curth takes time to remind us how organised drug-selling in the seventeenth century was. She also takes us on an interesting journey through some herbals of the time, though I don’t know why she puts the word ‘herbals’ in inverted commas, since the herbal is a well-known genre of non-fictional book. The section on commercial medicines is full of splendid detail. It details the importance of print to the advertisement of many horse-related products of the time – and includes an aside on the melancholy business of looking for lost horses by means of notices in cheap news-prints. It is all fascinating stuff, marred by annoying errors and odd decisions. One odd trait is evident in all chapters but especially this one – the arbitrary, nearly always unnecessary insertion of ‘sic’ after many quoted words with spellings slightly different to our own. We get square brackets and ‘sic’ after words such as ‘blew’, ‘ffowles’, ‘counsayls’ and ‘cartwares’. This is unnecessary – every scholar of the Renaissance knows that spellings have evolved somewhat in the last half a millennium.
Chapter Four details the role of astrology in Renaissance horse healing. Patiently, Curth explains the Greek origins of astrological thinking and points out that far from being dismissed, astrological knowledge was an essential fourth of the ‘quadrivium’ taught at European universities. Astrology was not anathema to religion, Curth points out. Reminding us that astrology was a profoundly respectable component of early modern thinking is an achievement in its own right. The role of astrology in human and horse care was substantial and serious, Curth insists. It was believed that parts of human anatomy were linked to planets; so it was also assumed that parts of animals were linked to planets. Almanacs were dependent on astrological expertise and were read voraciously by many. The history of this overlooked, essential genre of Renaissance ephemera is admirably detailed. Some almanacs were dedicated to horses – indeed, the reproduction of a ‘Zodiac horse’ is one of the book’s highlights.
In Chapter Five the focus is on preventative care for horses. This preventative care involved regulation of horses’ living spaces, their levels of exercise, their amount of sleep, their diet, their bloodletting and their sexual activities. There is fascinating detail in particular about early modern equine diets, especially about the components of and costs of horse bread. Horses were special beasts; they received more intellectual and physical care than other animals. Much evidence of the early modern regard for animals is bodied forth and we are reminded, usefully, of Gervase Markham’s Jacobean aphoristic assertion that keepers of horses should have affection for them. Perhaps though, we should not love horses as much as the Emperor Caligula allegedly did – his supposed elevation of a horse to the Roman Senate is alluded to on page 142 via a quotation from a 1673 book about horse management. But Curth doesn’t name Caligula directly. Why not, I wonder?
Chapter Six deals with remedial and surgical care of horses. We are helpfully told about early modern separations of diseases into categories of severity and of ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ ailments. The sophistication of early modern medicine is accounted for – as is the not unrelated science of knowing when planetary alignments suit the administering of such drugs. The pages on surgery are difficult to read simply because of the graphic nature of the descriptions of early modern surgical tools and processes – it is sad too to reflect on the horses that died under surgery and on Civil War battlefields alluded to by Curth. Sophisticated as early modern surgery was – it wasn’t all crude bloodletting and butchery of still-living flesh – some horses just could not be saved. The ultimate lesson of the chapter is well taken though: early modern vets were men of both theoretical learning and practical application – they did their very best and should be regarded not as primitive dilettantes but as serious men of culture.
The next chapter engages in detail with oral and manuscript culture of the period. It begins with a description of surviving medieval visual representations of horses. The chapter’s account of manuscripts relevant to horse care is gripping – Curth has extensively studied many relevant archives and generously describes manuscripts that most of us will have never have even heard of. Household books are accounted for – fascinating remedies for equine aliments are recorded in such books and almost as an aside we learn about affection expressed for horses. The rich collection of early modern ‘receipt books’ (or ‘recipe books’) at the Wellcome Library is engaged with to great effect.
The final chapter addresses the vast area of horse healing as it is described in myriad books of the early modern period. It begins with a strangely essentialist assertion that the desire to read self-help books is ‘simply a part of human nature’ (209). More usefully, the vast range of early writing advice on horse management is addressed. Veterinary care manuals were both popular and abundant. We learn a great deal about the range, variety and appeal of early modern horse writers: seminal writers on horse management of the Renaissance are accounted for, including Blundeville, Clifford, Markham and Snape. I was surprised, though, to find no mention of John Astley, who published The Art of Riding in 1584. Astley is so well known (not just as a writer on horses, admittedly) that he appears in effigy in the Maidstone Museum; there hangs, at present, a full-length portrait of him in the Elizabethan room of the National Portrait Gallery; there is, of course, a thorough ODNB entry on him; and his 1584 Riding book was well known even in pre-EEBO days because of a handsome ‘English Experience’ facsimile. Maybe Astley is just too famous to warrant a mention? That said, the chapter offers a thorough and colourful, albeit not definitive, description of horse writing in the period – there is a very intriguing aside about the usefulness of auction lists to help determine book ownership and reading patterns in the later parts of the 1600s.
After the eight chapters we get a conclusion that is, sadly, basically unreadable. It has repetitive comments, again, on the author’s previous outputs and a repeated statement about the point of the book – the point being that veterinary care has progressed through continuity and change, not through gradual, constant improvements. It is a totally convincing argument, but it is mangled in this botched, careless monograph. I’ll quote one sentence from this conclusion in its entirety – a sentence that ends a paragraph: ‘As a result, when references are made to the “pre-veterinary” period they generally consist of commonplaces based on the portrayal of animals as being treated by’ (243). Treated by what? Or who? On the last page, we are reminded that the Galenic-astrological model of health care for humans and horses ‘supported medical beliefs and practices for well over thousand years’; on the same page we learn of ‘the kernel that would eventually result in the true the institutionalization and possibly professionalization of veterinary medicine’ (245). I don’t have a clue what that means. It is infuriating. Reading this book was an enriching pleasure but it was also a tedious, time-consuming chore. Curth’s research is fascinating; her knowledge of early modern manuscripts and books about horse care is splendid; and her arguments about historical horse care are nearly always persuasive. This work needs to be disseminated and read: it is so important that but I would like to see it published again - competently. This new edition, preferably delivered by a different publisher, would be thirty pages shorter, would be shorn of repetition and self-citation and properly proofread.
Kevin De Ornellas
Ulster University
48.2.16
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