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Drawing upon a surprising wealth of evidence found in surviving manuscripts, this book restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care.Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late medieval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.This book restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

Disease and Society in Premodern England examines the impact of infectious disease in England from the everyday to pandemics in the period c. 500–c. 1600, with the major focus from the eleventh century onward. Theilmann blends historical research, using a variety of primary sources, with an understanding of disease drawn from current scientific literature to enable a better understanding of how diseases affected society and why they were so difficult to combat in the premodern world. The volume provides a perspective on how society and medicine reacted to'new'diseases, something that remains an issue in the twenty-first century. The'new'diseases of the Late Middle Ages, such as plague, syphilis, and the English Sweat, are viewed as helping to lead to a change in how people viewed disease causation and treatment. In addition to the biology of disease and its relationship with environmental factors, the social, economic, political, religious, and artistic impacts of various diseases are also explored.With discussions on a variety of diseases including leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, typhus, influenza, and smallpox, this volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of medicine and disease in premodern England.

Henry Daniel, fourteenth-century medical writer, Dominican friar, and contemporary of Chaucer, is one of the most neglected figures to whom we can attribute a substantial body of extant works in Middle English. His Liber Uricrisiarum, the earliest known medical text in Middle English, synthesizes authoritative traditions into a new diagnostic encyclopedia characterized by its stylistic verve and intellectual scope. Drawing on expertise from a range of scholars, this volume examines Daniel's capacious works and demonstrates their significance to many scholarly conversations, including the history of late medieval medicine. It explains the background for Daniel's uroscopic and herbal work, describes all known versions of the Liber Uricrisiarum and traces revisions over time, analyses Daniel's representations of his own medical practice, and demonstrates his influence on later medical and literary writers. Both a companion to the recently published reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum and a work of original scholarship in its own right, this collection promotes a wider understanding of Daniel's texts and prompts new discoveries about their importance.

A new exploration of the secular manuscripts and medieval medical texts associated with the York Guild and its members.Produced in 1486 and subsequently augmented, the Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library Egerton MS 2572) is a unique record of the knowledge, ambitions, activities and civic relationships maintained by the Barbers and Surgeons Guild over a period of 300 years. The manuscript's earliest folios contain images, astrological tracts, a plague treatise and a bloodletting poem. To these were added early modern ordinances and oaths, a series of royal portraits, and the names of the Guild's masters and apprentices. It is a rare survival of late medieval medical knowledge placed within a civic context.This new multi-disciplinary examination of the York Guild Book presents a comprehensive edition of its content and a detailed study of the creation and use of this fascinating manuscript. The York Guild Book was not owned by any one person but was intended to be representative of the types of manuscripts the Guild's members might have individually possessed. The Guild's commission elevated their manuscript's functional content into something which could be proudly owned and displayed, as is demonstrated by the stylishly executed pen and ink drawings, two of which are possibly unique. Through a contextualisation of the form and content of the manuscript, the book articulates ideas about material culture and the ceremonial role of secular manuscripts whilst shedding new light on the dissemination and status of medieval medical texts.

The Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse.Margery Kempe's various illnesses, mental, spiritual and physical, are a recurring theme in her Book. This volume, the first full-length interdisciplinary study from a medical humanities perspective, offers a medicalized reading of Kempe's spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, and thus a new way of interpreting the Book itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject. Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the author explores the ontology of female flesh; the productive use of pain, suffering and sickness; and the ethics of a maternal theology based on the melancholic and surrogate activities that underlie Kempe's experience. Structured broadly via a traverse through the life course, the book shows how Kempe'sresponse to suffering is illuminated by the medieval medical discourse by which she is contemporaneously read, and by which she engineers her own construction and understanding of self. It also explores Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels. LAURA KALAS is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University.

The present edition offers the diplomatic transcription of MS Wellcome 542, housing a late Middle English hitherto unedited remedy-book based on the medical lore of Hippocrates, Socrates and Galen. A glossary, notes and introduction also accompany the edition. The introduction has been conceived as a state of the art of this scientific treatise, and deals with the textual transmission of the text, a codicological/palaeographic description together with the scribe's dialect and idiolect. The edition therefore conforms itself as a primary source for research not only in Historical Linguistics but also in other related fields such as the History of Medicine or Ecdotics.

This volume presents the first edition of Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 509 (ff. 1r-167v), an English medical manuscript of the late Middle Ages. Copied in the second half of the fifteenth century, the larger part of the codex contains a witness of the Middle English Gilbertus Anglicus – a vernacular version of the Latin work Compendium medicinae, compiled by Gilbertus Anglicus ca. 1240. Its translation into Middle English is a representative document of the importance of the English language as a vehicle to transmit scientific knowledge. The number of extant copies (more than fifteen) is also proof of the significance of the text; however, most of these copies remain virtually unexplored. The manuscript also houses further treatises on humoural theory and uroscopy. All the texts comprised in MS Hunter 509 are labelled under the name System of Physic. The present edition, including an introduction, critical apparatus, notes, and glossary, aims to provide a reliable text of this medical compendium, which can be of use for research in historical linguistics, ecdotics, or the history of medicine.

The studies presented in this volume concentrate on different aspects of the medical, scientific and technical varieties of early English used in a wide range of medieval manuscripts. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of specialised texts is an opportunity to obtain access to the early history and vernacularisation of learned writing styles. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed ‘second-generation'corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning the digital edition of medical and scientific texts, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of dialectal specific traits are highlighted by the authors.

The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the inhabitants of late medieval England

Originally composed in Latin by Gilbertus Anglicus (Gilbert the Englishman), his Compendium of Medicine was a primary text of the medical revolution in thirteenth-century Europe. Composed mainly of medicinal recipes, it offered advice on diagnosis, medicinal preparation, and prognosis. In the fifteenth-century it was translated into Middle English to accommodate a widening audience for learning and medical “secrets.” Faye Marie Getz provides a critical edition of the Middle English text, with an extensive introduction to the learned, practical, and social components of medieval medicine and a summary of the text in modern English. Getz also draws on both the Latin and Middle English texts to create an extensive glossary of little-known Middle English pharmaceutical and medical vocabulary.

This book presents an engaging, detailed portrait of the people, ideas, and beliefs that made up the world of English medieval medicine between 750 and 1450, a time when medical practice extended far beyond modern definitions. The institutions of court, church, university, and hospital--which would eventually work to separate medical practice from other duties--had barely begun to exert an influence in medieval England, writes Faye Getz. Sufferers could seek healing from men and women of all social ranks, and the healing could encompass spiritual, legal, and philosophical as well as bodily concerns. Here the author presents an account of practitioners (English Christians, Jews, and foreigners), of medical works written by the English, of the emerging legal and institutional world of medicine, and of the medical ideals present among the educated and social elite.How medical learning gained for itself an audience is the central argument of this book, but the journey, as Getz shows, was an intricate one. Along the way, the reader encounters the magistrates of London, who confiscate a bag said by its owner to contain a human head capable of learning to speak, and learned clerical practitioners who advise people on how best to remain healthy or die a good death. Islamic medical ideas as well as the poetry of Chaucer come under scrutiny. Among the remnants of this far distant medical past, anyone may find something to amuse and something to admire.

Translation with original Latin text of medieval medical treatises, extending current knowledge of medieval medical science and learning.This second volume of Anglo-Norman Medicinecompletes Tony Hunt's edition of all the vernacular medical texts contained in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 0.1.20, presenting a treatise on visiting the sick and a verse translation of the first part of the celebrated gynaecological compilation known as `Trotula', both with their Latin originals. To these are added two longer works from other sources: the Euperistonand the Trinity `Practica', ambitious compilations which exploit material in Latin, French and English. Full notes and glossaries are provided. Tony Hunt's Introduction aims to illustrate characteristic features of the medieval medical compendium through the example of the Speculum medicorum, which has hithertobeen completely unstudied.TONY HUNTis a Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford.