The Mandrake Root in European History

Harry Potter fans might recognize this plant from a seveth-century Italian herbal: it is a mandrake, or in Latin, “mandragora.” So named because Ancient and Medieval Europeans thought the way that its root resembles a man (or a woman, see illustration three) was just so extra, the mandrake gained a reputation for producing effects far beyond their actual natural properties.

For many Medieval folks, the mandrake was thought to be able to control the human body because it resembled a teeny person (to them). For instance, some imagined that it could bring about a woman’s love if a man carried a sample in his pocket. And if a woman put a baby-shaped mandrake under her pillow, she might conceive. This is definitely not accurate, but typifies the way pre-Modern Europeans extrapolated.

My favorite superstition about the mandrake tells how to safely dig one up. Some manuscripts record that — just like in _Harry Potter_ — mandrake will shriek so loudly when unearthed that the sound would kill unprotected listeners. An awfully mean work-around was to tie a rope between a hungry dog’s tail and the mandrake root and throw the poor animal a treat. The dog would run, the mandrake plant would be dug up and its wails would kill the dog. But nearby humans who plugged their ears with wax would survive. (Slide two).

Some Ancient texts described the properties without recourse to magic and odd extrapolation, and correctly noted that the mandrake could cause drowsiness and blunt pain, but be fatal in large doses. As the _Alphabet of Galen_ (derived from 4th c BCE Greece) relates: mandrake can “induce a debilitating fatigue, and therefore is believed to be soporific. It does, however, reduce all pain and alertness”. In fact, the plant also has hallucinogenic properties.

In the Early Modern period, the scientific revolution put the kibosh on the charming but wrong ideas about mandrakes and focused on the plants’ observable properties (slide 4). The line of the poet John Donne listing all sorts of impossibly fantastic things demonstrates this trend: “Go and catch a falling star,/ Get with child a mandrake root,/ Tell me where past years are,/ Or who cleft the devil’s foot” . . .