Imagine the kitchen of a Tudor home after midnight. The hearth glows faintly, iron pots hiss on the embers, and bundles of herbs sway from the rafters like a warning. The air smells of rosemary, vinegar, and something a little less pleasant, animal, metallic.

In a world where magic, medicine, and rumor all share the same shelf, the right potion

could win you a lover or perhaps remove an inconvenient one. Settle in, my friend, with a coffee

or tea, get cozy because today we are stepping into an uneasy borderland,

Tudor love potions and poisons. Both promised power. Both could get you hanged.

Hey, friend, welcome back to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History Podcast.

I am your host, Heather, and I have been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009 with my show,

making it the original Tudor History podcast. I am, as always, delighted, thrilled,

spookified that you are here with me during this spooky week when all of our content and videos will be about Halloween.

I don't know why I'm doing that, but there we go.

I'm also going to tell you about a very special Halloween event that I have got planned, so stay tuned for that.

All right, let's dig in and talk about potions and poisons.

For the Tudors, love wasn't a mystery of the heart. It was simply chemistry. Physicians talked about the

four humors, hot, cold, wet, and dry. Desire meant an excess of heat. So the cure or the cause lay in herbs that stoked

fire in the body. Cunning women and wise men gathered their ingredients, not from their imagination,

but from the hedgerow and the butcher's shop. So there's a book, The Good Housewives Jewel,

Good Housewives Jewel, published in

1585, listing recipes to provoke courage in man or woman. They involved male sparrow brains,

believed to contain the bird's mating vigor mixed with milk and cloves. Add in a little honey

to disguise the taste, because apparently even love had limits.

Writer Carol McGrath notes that Tudor aphrodisiacs, aphrodisiacs, I can talk, often relied on

symbols of vitality, nuts for fertility, oysters for virility, blueberries for blood flow,

...