Sacred Mysteries: On the tracks of the treacle of Gilead

In the language of the 1611 Bible, Jeremiah asks: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Or, as the earlier Bishops’ Bible of 1568 phrased it, the question was: “Is there not triacle at Gilead?”

In her blog, the medievalist Eleanor Parker, a columnist for History Today, says that one of her favourite bits of poetry comes in Piers Plowman – the lines beginning: “For Truthe telleth that love is triacle of hevene: / May no synne be on hym seene that that spice useth.”

For treacle has come down in the world as an English word. Now it means no more than a kind of half-refined sugar. Six hundred years ago it was a healing balm, and the word drew upon associations with panaceas like the elixir of life, that could cure all ills and do away with death.

In Alice in Wonderland, when the Dormouse talks of a “treacle well”, Alice exclaims: “There’s no such thing!” But Lewis Carroll, as the Rev Charles Dodgson,...