More Selections from A Thousand Notable Things (1579).

[ I.47] THe Woort leafe layde on the crowne of the heade, draweth up the Uvula, or the flap in the throate. By the report of Mizaldus.

[ I.53] THe juyce of Broome myxt with the oyle of Radish or of Mustarde, is a very safe remedy for the kylling or destroying of [Lice].

[ II.6] MAny women with childe of the [sudden] or unlooked for, meeting, or [sudden] seeing of an Hare, or for the desyre or longing to eate of the same: do bring forth chyldren with a cloven overlyppe, and forkedwyse, called a Hare lyppe. Daylie experience confyrmes it. Mizaldus.

[ II.16] THe soles of the feete annoynted with the fatte of a Dormouse, doth procure sleepe. As Actius doth saye.

[II. 53] THe people of Astomores (as [Pliny] reportes) have no mouth: and are clad with a woolly mosse growing in India, and lyves onely with smelling of Odours at their nose, of Rootes and of Flowres, and of Ap[p]les that growes in the woods: which they carrie with them in their long iourneys to susteyne and nourish them withall, [lest] they should want wherof to smell.

*

The quotes from Mizaldus, in Thomas Lupton's A Thousand Notable Things, are primarily from Antoine Mizaldus's De Arcanis Naturae, Libelli Quatuor (On the Secrets of Nature in four books). Like so many early modern scientists, Mizaldus was as much mountebank as researcher. More popular and more fictional than other purported men of science, his many books were on a par with the modern supermarket tabloid.

Pliny's Natural History was written in the first century CE and was the single most popular source of many medieval conceptions and misconceptions.

Both these authors wrote in Latin and Lupton translated them for the growing new audience literate in English. To these he adds curious folk tales and medicines. The combination was so popular that A Thousand Notable Things continued to be reprinted into the 18^th century.

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