The Tudor Woman Who Ran the Household Pharmacy (And Accidentally Poisoned Everyone)

About this episode

The episode explores the life of a Tudor woman responsible for managing her household's pharmacy and the challenges she faced.

In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available. She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter. We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People in this episode

Host: Heather Teysko

Topics covered

• Tudor England
• household pharmacy
• women in history
• medicinal practices
• cosmetics
• herb harvesting

Keywords

• Tudor woman
• household pharmacy
• medicinal herbs
• rose water
• cosmetics
• poisoning
• historical women

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Tudor England

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