Housewives As Healers Housewives As Healers Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Housewifery Home Remedies Education Science Herbal Remedies Medicine Midwifery Published by LEMDO edits to bib items for MLA 9 Published by LEMDO Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Overview

Women provided much of the basic medical care that people received in early modern England. In addition to household duties such as growing, storing, and preparing food, a housewife in 16th and 17th century England cared for her family’s (including any servants or laborers) basic and routine medical needs. Robert Greene, a rival of William Shakespeare, once claimed in A Quip for an Upstart Courtier) that but for myself, if I be ill at ease I take kitchen physic; I make my wife my doctor and my garden my apothecary’s shop.

Instruction in Healing

Many books were published in the period that featured instructions for women who needed to prepare and administer medicine. Thomas Tusser’s 1580 rhyming set of lessons Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry offers many remedies that women with limited literacy could memorize; it was published in 23 editions between 1567 and 1641. Another popular book, Gervase Markham’s 1615 volume, The English Housewife, notes that: To begin then with one of the most principal virtues which doth belong to our English housewife: you shall understand that since the preservation and care of the family, touching their health and soundness of body, consisteth most in her diligence, it is meet fitting that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer many wholesome receipts recipes or medicines for the good of their healths, as well as to prevent the first occasion of sickness as to take away the effects and evil of the same when it hath made a seizure on the body.

But women mainly learned medical craft from their mothers or other women in the family, friends, or neighbors. They prepared with homegrown ingredients for or obtained from apothecaries the oils, ointments, syrups, and other treatments needed for all standard illnesses and injuries. They frequently distilled medicines and administered medical treatment for infections, burns, fractures, and fevers, in addition to acting as birth attendants or even delivering babies in place of midwives.

Treatments

Early modern housewives were trusted sources of medical treatment in ther period. They knew how to clean wounds, treat fevers, bind broken bones, and use herbal remedies for a variety of conditions. Women regularly record handwritten recipes for the remedies they used in the diaries and letters that survive. For example, willow bark (the salicylic acid from which was eventually purified into aspirin) was known to treat pain, but bay, lavender, rose, and sage were also used for headaches. Herbs like comfrey were used for lung conditions, and mint and wormwood for stomach ailments.

Sources Fissel, Mary Elizabeth. Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe.Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 82, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 1–17. Green, Monica H. Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Ashgate, 2000. Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. Edited by Michael Best. McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Porter, Roy. Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 1995. Strocchia, Sharon T. Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe. Renaissance Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, Sep. 2014, pp. 496–514. The Healing Arts: Health, Disease, and Society in Europe, 1500–1800. edited by Peter Elmer, Manchester UP, 2004.
Open-Access Digital Resources Best, Michael. In Sickness and in Health…. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, 04 Jan. 2011, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/sickness.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Fissel, Mary. The Range of Healers in Early Modern England. Reading Early Medicine. Johns Hopkins University, 02 Jul. 2018, https://readingearlymedicine.org/initiatives/the-range-of-healers-in-early-modern-england/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2026. Tusser, Thomas. Five Hundred Points of Husbandry (1580). Edited by W. Payne and Sydney Herttage, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/fivehundredpoint08tussuoft/fivehundredpoint08tussuoft_djvu.txt. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.