Joanna Partyka

Is folk herbalism truly folk? Exploring 19th- and 20thcentury debates on the roots of phytotherapy

The question of the direction of information fl ow related to herbal treatment has been a topic of interest for researchers for centuries. However, “infl uenceology,” which involves identifying mutual relationships and dependencies, can be misleading, especially when seeking one-way solutions as a desirable form of response to issues related to broadly defi ned cultural phenomena. The term “infl uence-ology” was coined by literary scholars criticizing the positivist methodology derived from evolutionism. This methodology focused on fi nding all possible infl uences between literary works, resulting in often unwarranted and even ridiculous conclusions, and above all, leading to the squandering of what is the essence of literature. It seems that an ethnologist tracing infl uence in the context of herbal medicine loses sight of what is the essence of folk culture. The question “Is folk herbalism folk?” assumes a historical and source nature and contains an evolutionary desire to determine a one-way infl uence. Although poorly posed, it opens up the fi eld for presenting arguments that the parties used in the discussion. These considerations are the subject of this article.

At the moment, the majority of papers concerning women’s writing oscillates between cultural studies and literary studies, or history studies and literary studies. Such a view on women’s creative output and, in more general terms, women’s presence in culture, seems to bring the best results. Due to academic development in recent decades and the so-called “return of the subject” in philosophical, social, historical and literary studies, these disciplines gained a perspective that turns to womanly experiences, and interprets them with specific methodologies, thereby rendering them valid objects of study and representative voices of a given epoch.
In studies on early modern women’s literature, we should create a space for dialogue between philological studies, social history, the history of culture and gender studies. Only such an attitude makes it possible to avoid misunderstandings inscribed in the studies on early modern culture carried out with the application of modern and post-modern analytical categories, including the category of gender. At the same time, we should bear in mind that gender always remains a category that is useful in historico-literary analyses, if it keeps its critical relation to binary categories “woman”/“man” and “femininity”/“masculinity”, as well as to its own function consisting of forming social dynamics based on the sexual difference. Thus understood dialogical perspective allows going beyond the programmatic and methodological frames of feminist studies, in which a “woman” and a “man” are presented as permanent and closed categories that can only be used to describe various social roles, but do not lead to any critical interpretation of these roles.