Today is April 20, aka 4/20, which has been associated in the US since the 1970s with marijuana. Here, we are in a transition phase regarding weed’s medical and recreational legalization, with some states allowing and others forbidding. But in the Middle Ages no regulation or moral questioning of the plant existed.
Medieval Europeans gathered pot for various usages, as this illustration shows. Coming from the late 12th century, it depicts a marijuana plant with the Latin caption “the name of this plant is Canabe”. Cropped out of the photo is another statement, “Grows but in waste places, and at roadsides, and along hedges. The very best medicine for healing”. The manuscript this illustration comes from was a medical and herbal book that also discussed such topics as the removal of hemorrhoids and cauterization.
Sources: BL Sloane 1975; @publicdomainrev
