Botanical Sources of Early Medicines (article)

Botanical Sources of Early Medicines
By William S. Keezer, for Bios (1963)

This article is a discussion of some early botanists and herbalists, with examples of common toxic, medicinal and sacred herbs that concern them in their work.

Regarding plants mentioned in the Travels and other useful things:
-Keezer discusses RHUBARB and its history as a medicinal plant (185)
-He discusses Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Ebers Papynus, and Rig-Veda as classical sources of plant information
-He discusses herbals and herbalists, including Apuleius Platonicus, Ortus Sanitatis, Herboarius Moguntinus, Tycharde Banckes, Peter Trevens, Leonard Fuch and John Parkinson
-The last of these herbalists – John Parkinson – apparently had an image of a vegetable lamb on the cover of his 1629 text Parasisi in sole, Paradisus Terrestris
-About the vegetable lamb, Keezer cites the following: [Guthrie, Douglas. A History of Medicine, J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1946].

Spices in India (article)

Spices in India
By M. Ilyas, for Economic Botany (1976)

This article is, as the title suggests, a discourse on spices in India. Ilyas details some of the typical uses of spices: [1] “a condiment and for seasoning food” (273), [2] “preservation and seasoning of meat” (273), [3] used in "medicines, cosmetics and the tobacco industry" (273), and [4] “act as stimulants, carminatives and diuretics” (273).

Ilyas includes a long description of the methods used to propagate, cultivate, harvest and prepare different varieties of pepper. Nothing about serpents and lemons, but if I need a scientific point of view to balance out Mandeville’s pepper narrative, note to self: here it is.

The Date of [Composition of] Mandeville's Travels (articles)

The Date of Mandeville’s Travels
By J. D. Thomas, for Modern Language Notes (1957)

and

The Date of Composition of Mandeville’s Travels
By Arpad Steiner, for Speculum (1934)

The Thomas piece is a brief article of fairly tangential relevance (to me). In it, Thomas presents a summary of the thoughts of critics (up until that point) on when the Travels might have been composed.

For my purposes, it is simply useful to note:
The actual date likes lies between “1355, the earliest year of authorship stated by any version” (Thomas 165) and “1371, the scribal date given in the oldest datable manuscript” (Thomas 165). Hamelius gives 1362 as the terminus a quo, with his likely date (accepted by some but by no means universally) as 1366 (Thomas 166).

The Steiner article, also brief, does not disagree with the above beyond setting the terminus a quo a bit later. It, predating Thomas by two decades and more, simply gives some historical background on different episodes in the Travels that can assist in the dating. Says Steiner, “the date of composition of Mandeville’s Travels may easily have been 1366” (Steiner 147), but certainly “the Travels were composed between 1365 and the early part of 1371” (Steiner 147).

Well: should anyone ask me when the Travels was written, I now have something to cover my ass.