On the Mandrake Root and the Complications of Liminality: A Conversation with Andres Orejuela

Andres, thank you for taking the time to reflect on the subject of your research at the New York Botanical Garden. In terms of the commons, I find the symbolic currency of the mandrake root to be enticing; its ability to open up thresholds between worlds seems to me to be a useful device for working toward an equitable and co-created urban, where the cosmos swirls together in closer-than-ever proximity. Hearing your personal reflections couched in the literary analysis that is the focus of your research, illustrates some of the themes and tensions that arose during HUB, and suggests that the ways through those tensions are immanently self-determined - but that it can be be quite tricky to determine what that self-determination actually is.

JM: Can you speak a bit about why the mandrake root became so popular in literature, and what it helped to communicate in these texts?

AO: The mandrake brings an air of magic. This means that the mandrake is associated with witchcraft, superstition, and all sorts of improbabilities. In the literary work I study, The Duchess of Malfi, the mandrake has both supernatural and fraudulent resonances, since some characters suggest that they believe in the ability of this root to kill by touch or shriek aloud, and others define the root as a narcotic, which it is in fact, dispelling the most lurid and fanciful myths surrounding what is essentially the root of a plant. Perhaps this part of the reason why the mandrake has become so popular, because of our justified and endless fascination with roots.

JM: From a personal perspective, I want to ask what spoke to you the most when researching the mandrake root - which elements, and why you think these elements appealed to you?

AO: I liked about the mandrake what I liked about the play--nothing is as it seems, everything is fundamentally duplicitous, concealing something unknown and powerful beneath its surface. The mandrake had this depth to it, and had a relationship to nature in general, which, at least in the play I'm writing about, is ultimately only knowable through the human mind, through what we make of nature, whether that is a legendary root with incredible powers or an anaesthetic tincture used in medicine. It is fair to say that I agree with this perspective and that I myself am fundamentally double in ways that even I am unaware of.

JM: Finally, did your research of the mandrake root change your outlook on the topics they evoked? If so, how has it contributed to the evolution of your PhD project?

AO: Once I found out that the mandrake had these associations, I began to compare it with other poisons, plants, and roots mentioned in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. What I found was, on the one hand, a deep engagement with literary culture and a kind of book that was popular in the Renaissance, the herbal, which essentially lists plants, roots, and so forth and their properties. Since I had many Renaissance herbals at hand in the wonderful special collections area of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden, I examined the books themselves, comparing them with medieval and nineteenth-century herbals. I loved the commentary of Renaissance scholars such as Pietro Andrea Mattioli, because theirs was an attempt both to systematize learning and to compile popular beliefs and practices that Mattioli at least criticizes quite humorously! I was also deeply impressed by the print culture that led to the many editions of a single work across languages and printers, each with their own particularities.

On the other hand, I found that the playwrights were merely toying or playing with popular associations and by extension with the mandrake or aconite or whatever. What really interested them--and I think it is in fact much more interesting--is how these plants and roots come to embody our human frailties, wishes, desires, fears or anything else, so that when we think we are reading nature and the natural world we are more often not simply reading ourselves. This idea is very much a part of my dissertation, in which I examine early modern introspective practices, paying close attention to the ways in which looks within ourselves often fail to see what should be obvious--particularly to us!