Lettuce, poppy seeds and woman’s milk: sleep remedies in seventeenth-century English receipt books

Sleep in general in the early modern period is a fascinating and understudied
subject, on the cusp of the magic of earlier times and the development of
modern scientific methods. Roger Ekirch’s ground-breaking research into
the history of night suggested that people experienced sleep differently
before the development of modern street lighting, expecting to wake up for
an hour or two in the middle of the night before falling in to a second
sleep. This does not mean, however, that insomnia was not perceived as a
problem in the early modern period. The wealth and variety of sleeping
potions and herbal remedies suggests that combatting insomnia was as much a
concern in early modern society as it is today.

This paper analyses sleep remedies contained in seventeenth-century receipt
collections held in the archives of the Wellcome Trust, the British Library
and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Looking back to Anglo-Saxon herb
charms, and forward to contemporary debates about sleeping drugs, it places
early modern remedies in the context of the history of sleep medicine as a
whole. Such an approach will give us further insight into how early modern
people thought about, and expeirenced, sleep.

An interdisciplinary seminar series aimed at researchers from all
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The seminar is followed by a refreshment break prior to interdisciplinary
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