The Book of Noah: The Roots the Watchers Taught and Heaven Gave Back
The Book of Noah in Jubilees 10 answers 1 Enoch’s charge that the Watchers taught root-cutting, and the Carolingian monks kept that answer bed by bed.
Essays
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Medieval Spices and Galen: Why Taillevent Seasoned the Way He Did
Medieval spices and Galen belong in the same sentence, and once you see why, a fourteenth-century recipe stops looking strange. I have spent this week with the Viandier of Taillevent, the cookbook attached to Guillaume Tirel, cook to Charles V of France. Every page asks for ginger, cinnamon, cloves, saffron and grains of paradise, worked…
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Carolingian Garden Plants: 3 Lists, One Garden
Carolingian garden plants from three ninth-century sources, compared side by side: the Capitulare de Villis, the Plan of St Gall and Walahfrid’s Hortulus.
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Carolingian Height and Diet: The Table Charlemagne Kept
Skeletons and army records show Charlemagne’s Franks stood tall, Louis XIV’s France shrank, and American farm boys outgrew the French gentry. Here is why.
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Hildegard von Bingen’s Herbalism
From Charlemagne to the 12th Century — and What Was Lost Between Hildegard von Bingen’s herbalism is perhaps the most frequently cited and least accurately understood figure in the contemporary Western herbalism revival. She appears on tea tins and wellness websites, her name attached to adaptogenic blends and ‘medieval wisdom’ skincare. She is claimed by…
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Plant Intelligence Herbalism History: The Epistemology of Rupture
“The plants have virtues hidden from us, and the physician who does not know them labours in the dark.” — attributed to Galen of Pergamon, 2nd century AD Something is circulating online — a clip, a quote, a breathless caption — claiming that your houseplant senses your arrival from two kilometres away. That it responds…
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Before the Monks: The Gaulish Herbal Inheritance of the Creuse
“The Druids make it their business to know many things by heart, and so they spend twenty years in training. They consider it improper to commit their doctrines to writing.” — Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI.14 A Coin Hoard and a Question About Gaulish Herbal Inheritance At the beginning of the twentieth century, a farmer…
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What We Set in Motion: The Avalanche and the Imager
On criticality, cascade, and what we set in motion Part II of a continuing meditation on being and calling The first thing to understand about an avalanche is that it does not begin with force. It begins with a threshold. What We Set In Motion A single crystal of snow shifts. On most slopes, on…
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On Being a Better Imager: What It Means To Live Fully
A meditation on finitude, calling, and the weight of being specifically you . . . What it means to live fully is not, finally, an abstract question. There is a signal firing in your brain that has never fired in exactly that way before, in any brain, in the history of the world. Neuroscientists recently confirmed…
