A REPUBLICAN HERBAL OWNED BY A FRIEND OF MILTON
CULPEPER, Thomas.
The English Physician enlarged: with three hundred, sixty, and nine Medicines made of English Herbs that were not in any Impression until this … being an astrologo-physical Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this Nation …
London, Peter Cole, 1653.
8vo, pp. [24], 173, 284–6, 187–191, 292–398 [i.e. 288], [16], with initial leaf with the publisher’s woodcut arms (partly torn), and a longitudinal title leaf (C8); somewhat shaken, dampstain at head throughout, but a good copy in contemporary speckled sheep; worn, spine chipped at head and foot, rear cover with an early amateur repair to restitch the cover to the boards; five manuscript extracts from Suetonius to the front endpaper, ownership inscription to rear endpaper ‘Ex Libris Thomae Elwoodii’, with the initials ‘TE’ stamped on both covers; with a later letter on the provenance dated 1880 tipped to the front pastedown; housed in a cloth box.
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The English Physician enlarged: with three hundred, sixty, and nine Medicines made of English Herbs that were not in any Impression until this … being an astrologo-physical Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this Nation …
Second (first octavo) edition, enlarged with ‘very many Additions to every Sheet’, of Culpeper’s magnum opus, The English Physician (1652), this copy from the library of Thomas Elwood (1639–1714), the Quaker friend of John Milton who provided him with the cottage at Chalfont St Giles during the plague.
Culpeper has some claim to be the most famous medic of the mid-seventeenth century, though chiefly in his opposition to the Royal College of Physicians, who had him arraigned on charges of witchcraft in 1642. Having abandoned Cambridge, he had begun work as an apothecary’s assistant in 1634, and by 1644 had established his own practice in Red Lion Street near Spitalfields. A committed republican who also opposed Cromwell, Culpeper served in the Parliamentary army, and it may have been a lingering war injury that led to his early death in 1654. ‘Culpeper’s most significant service … on which he worked the hardest and for which he is best remembered, was writing and translating books, enabling the poor to help themselves’ (ODNB), first his Physical Directory (1649), a democratic translation of the recondite Pharmacopiae Londinensis, and then his English Physician (first published in folio in 1652). The latter ‘provided a comprehensive list of native medicinal herbs, indexed to a list of typical illnesses, using an astrological, rather than Galenic, approach (of the kind still flourishing in popular British culture), and set out in a straightforward and frank style. It sold widely at the time, and there have been over one hundred subsequent editions, including fifteen before 1700’ (ibid.).
To this second edition, now in a handy pocket size, published September 1653, Culpeper made numerous changes and added a preface ‘To the Reader’ in which he warns of inaccurate counterfeit copies in duodecimo. He loses no opportunity for digs at the Physicians, for example in his entry for ‘Ars-Smart’ or water pepper, where notes that ‘our Colledg of Physitians out of their learned care for the publick good Anglice their own gain, mistake [the hot water pepper for the mild] in their New Master-Piece, whereby they discover 1 Their Ignorance, 2 Their Carelessness, and he that hath but half an eye, may see their pride without a pair of Spectacles.’
‘Culpeper’s medical radicalism … led to his association with the Hartlib Circle. Samuel Hartlib, to whom Milton dedicated Of Education (1644) [a work that enjoined knowledge of plants], joined with Culpeper to lobby Parliament to create a “Colledge of Noble Mechaniques and Ingenious Artificers.” They secured funding for this venture in 1647. Hartlib’s partnership with Culpeper attacked the medical monopoly that stifled the free circulation of medical knowledge among the commonalty – a resistance to print monopolies that also drives Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica’ (Lecky, ‘Milton’s experienced Eve’, Philological Quarterly 96.4, 2017). Milton’s own interest in gardens is also well attested, and much has been written about references to herbs and other flora in his works from Comus to Paradise Lost. Whether he owned a copy or not, it is hard to imagine he was unaware of Culpeper’s work.
The poet and controversialist Thomas Elwood or Ellwood (1639–1714) suffered many imprisonments for his Quaker beliefs, and a number of periods of ill health for which Culpeper might have proven useful. It was after a bout of smallpox in 1662 that he came to London at the invitation of Isaac Pennington to read to the now blind Milton. Several further detentions followed, before one of which in July 1665 he had hired for Milton the cottage at Chalfont St Giles where the poet lived during the outbreak of plague. It was on a visit after his release there that Ellwood saw the manuscript of Paradise Lost and famously (if possibly apocryphally) asked Milton what he had to say of ‘paradise found’. The inscription here is in the same hand as that of Elwood’s manuscript collection of poems ‘Rhapsodia’ (now at Friends’ House), though the poems there are signed with initials only. Manicules and crosses in the advertisements for Cole draw attention to several works on grace by William Bridge and John Pawson, but the classical quotations on the endpapers do not appear to be his.
ESTC R19808; Wing C7502; Henrey I, 57.
