Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England

Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England is Oswald Cockayne's nineteenth century critical edition, in three volumes published 1864 to 1866 in the Rolls Series, of the surviving Old English medical texts, including the first printing of the Lacnunga charm and remedy collection. Its value as a primary source is real: it remains, over a century and a half later, the place where this corpus was first made available in print at all. Its limit is equally real and already noted on the source record, it is a Victorian edition whose readings and glosses have been superseded on many points by later Old English philology, so a specific difficult reading should be checked against a modern critical edition where precision matters, even though Cockayne's text remains a legitimate starting point for the corpus as a whole.