Review of Faith Wallis, ed. Medieval Medicine, A Reader (original) (raw)
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A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages - front matter
A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages, 2021
The Middle Ages are well-known for the growth of universities and urban regulations, plague pandemics, increasingly sophisticated ways of causing injury in warfare, and abiding frameworks for health and illness provided by religion. Increasingly, however, archaeologists, historians and literary specialists have come together to flesh out the daily lives of medieval people at all levels of society, both in Christian Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages follows suit, but also brings new approaches and comparisons into the conversation. Through the investigation of poems, pottery, personal letters, recipes and petitions, and through a breadth of topics running from street-cleaning, cooking and amulets to religious treatises and death rituals, this volume accords new meaning and value to the period and those who lived it. Its chapters confirm that the study of latrines, patterns of manuscript circulation, miracle narratives, sermons, skeletons, metaphors and so on, have as much to tell us about attitudes towards health and illness as do medical texts. Delving within and beyond texts, and focusing on the sensory, the experiential, the personal, the body and the spirit, this volume celebrates and critiques the diverse and complex cultural history of medieval health and medicine.
“Medicine and Devotion in the Later Middle Ages,” Filologia Mediolatina 22 (2015), 239-256.
This article presents an edition and a brief analysis of one late medieval devo- tional poem addressed to the Virgin Mary and entitled Oratio de Domina multum utilis. The poem is preserved in a single manuscript copied in Wrocław in the fif- teenth century and now London, British Library, Additional 18922. Even though it belongs to a rich tradition of personal devotional poetry, the Oratio analysed here exhibits a novel approach to describing the healing powers of the Virgin and to extolling her reputation as divina medicina for the Christian believer.The unique- ness of the piece is revealed in its highly technical medical vocabulary that suggests that its author, in addition to being an accomplished poet, was a medicus or an apothecarius with impressive empirical knowledge of the medical practices of his time.
Faith and religion are part and parcel of the field of medicine and of healing practices. For in times of illness, we are in need of faith. We might express our faith in those who aim to heal us as we recognize and trust their ability to do so. In some settings, both today and in the past, such faith takes on explicit spiritual and religious meanings. It is performed through rituals and shaped by belief systems, shared (or not) between patients, doctors and other caregivers. In other settings, it is the belief in science or other concepts of medicine that drives patients’, caregivers’ and scientists’ search for cures and well-being. Moreover, outside the biomedical domain, hope for improvement drives the search for alternative modes of healing and self-healing, practices often strongly imbued with faith, rituals and conversion narratives. The 2021 EAHMH conference places these questions of trust, belief, religion, hope and devotion centre stage in the history of medicine and health. More information on the KU Leuven website: https://kuleuvencongres.be/eahmh2021
2009
Hitherto peripheral (if not outright ignored) in general medieval historiography, medieval medical history is now a vibrant subdiscipline, one that is rightly attracting more and more attention from ‘mainstream’ historians and other students of cultural history. It does, however, have its particular characteristics, and understanding its source materials, methods, and analytical limitations may help those not trained in the field better navigate, explore and potentially contribute to its possibilities for illuminating the intersections of medicine and health with other aspects of medieval culture. Although this article focuses primarily on western Europe, many of its observations are also relevant to the Islamic world and Byzantium precisely because all three cultures shared many of the same intellectual traditions and social structures. The attached bibliography serves as a general introduction to the current state of the field.