Sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum) is included in the Magic Bed because of the beliefs associated with the herb in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Greeks and Romans believed basil to be a plant of hatred and misfortune; it would only prosper if the gardener cursed and abused it when the seed was sown. This association of ideas may have given birth to a long-lived belief that there was a special affinity between basil and scorpions, a claim still maintained in the seventeenth century. Scorpions might be found in or beneath pots in which basil was grown, and it was even said that excessive handling or smelling of basil engendered scorpions in the brain.

Bocaccio’s story of Lisabetta, who planted her murdered lover’s head in a pot of basil and watered it with her tears (Decameron IV, 5) is another instance of the strange and unhappy character assigned to the plant. (This story was famously retold by John Keats, and painted by William Holman Hunt).

As you mention, our basil grows quite happily next to our rue (Ruta graveolens), despite the fact that the seventeenth-century herbalist Nicholas Culpepper claimed that rue was inimical to basil, and that the latter could not grow near the former. He explained this antipathy as a concomitant of rue’s power as a supreme antidote, and the testimony of Dioscorides, Galen, and Pliny that basil ought not to be consumed. According to medieval herbalists, however, basil was a plant of medicinal value. Both Hildegard of Bingen and the Hortus Sanitatis, recommend its use for a variety of ailments.