Brother Cadfael's Herb Garden by Robin Whiteman

Ellis Peters' study is there, you can work on your own illustrated manuscript, but best of all there is a twelfth-century herb garden with a replica of Cadfael's workshop. There follows a brief list of additional plants and then the jewel in the crown, a description (one might even call it a love letter), of the Shrewsbury Quest, a medieval heritage center in present-day Shrewsbury, just across the street from the Abbey of St. Like peanut butter? (You have to find a specialty store catering to Americans to find peanut butter in London, FYI.) Itself followed by an 'A-Z of Medieval Plants and Herbs.' Among many delightful entries, we learn that almonds were used to make a kind of butter. even Prior Robert, who disapproved of the amount of freedom granted to Cadfael, considered him to be 'the abbey's most skilled herbalist and apothecary.'' There follows a chapter on herbs and healing In the very last novel, Brother Cadfael's Penance, set at the end of 1145, Cadfael is found 'standing motionless in the middle of his small, beloved kingdom, staring rather within his own mind that at the straggling, autumnal growth about him.'' The closing of the year and the imminent arrival of winter brings the entire sequence of Chronicles to a close. In Chapter 3 Whiteman makes a case for Ellis' seasonal progress in the twenty Cadfael novels, ending with But enough survived for a chapter on the monastic garden, where we learnĪs the followers of the Benedictine Rule had a Christian duty to care for the sick and needy, 'before all things and above all things', plants were grown with special emphasis on their medicinal and healing virtues. You'd think at least a few of Henry's New Men would have recognized the value of these priceless texts and rescued them, but noooo-oooo. Whole shiploads, we are told, were sent abroad to the book-binders, that vellum or parchment might be cut up in their trade. First comes a first-rate introduction, the most harrowing part of which details the destruction of so many monastic herbals during Henry VIII's Dissolution

Here Whiteman delves into Cadfael's garden, where so many ills were treated and so many mysteries solved. Robin Whiteman has made something of a career out of creating works based around the world of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael novels (see also Cadfael Country and The Cadfael Companion).

Brother Cadfael's Herb Garden by Robin Whiteman