Therapeutic Baths in Medieval English Medicine

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.

2016

This dissertation does not exceed 88,000 words in length, including main text, all notes, and appendices, but excluding bibliography and translations of quoted text, as approved in advance.

Linguistica Silesiana 38: 112-124, 2017

In late medieval England learned medicine leapt the walls of universities and became available to people with no formal medical training (cf. also Jones 1999, Jones 2004). This widespread interest in medicine was partly triggered by the vernacularisation of medical writings. This process involved, among other things, (1) gradual evolution of conventions and norms for, e.g. recipe writing (cf. Carroll 2004) and/or (2) employment of various strategies to adapt the texts to the new audience. The study will attempt to explain what strategies were employed to adapt medical texts, in particular recipes, to the intended audience, i.e., "who speaks [writes] what language to whom and when" (Fishman 1979: 15). For instance, some recipes contain foreign (mostly French and Latin) or sophisticated terminology whereas other recipe collections make use of vernacular resources. This implies that the language of medieval recipes might be the indicator of a social distinction between the readers. The data for the paper come from the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises written between 1330 and 1500.

In our current research project entitled 'Spas in the Western Empire: the technological and social impact of Rome in the exploitation of mineral-medicinal water', we attempt to identify the characteristics of Roman spas, in contrast to those baths that used ordinary water, in order to understand their meaning and function. One of the most difficult and interesting topics to develop in our study is the need to recognise the role of medicine in these establishments within the context of health and religion. Therefore, in this paper, we try to show some of the more representative evidence of this duality, starting with the evolution and development of Roman spas.

Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care, 2015

To the ancient mind water—especially the ‘living’ water of springs, rivers, and lakes—was sacred and possessed a power to cleanse or heal unlike any other natural substance. This paper argues that in the pre-imperial history of bathing, seeking the waters for treatment was a fundamental and widespread act that also had religious implications. The case is made on the basis of ancient texts and archaeological evidence from thermal springs in Italy during the 4th-1st centuries BCE. Several ancient authors who practiced medicine and wrote on medical topics recommended hydrotherapy in various forms (bathing, drinking, sweating in vapour) for a range of maladies and conditions. But authors with interests outside medicine also praised many springs in Italy well known for their therapeutic benefits. Votive objects (anatomical models, figurines, ceramic vessels) and structural remains—from the Po River valley to Apulia—corroborate the popularity of thermal sites and also attest a close association between bathing, healing and ritual acts. The common thread among many of these sites is Etruscan presence, but in the Po valley it is possible that 5th-century BCE remains attest a continuation of older Celtic practices. If the later Roman habit of bathing in the great imperial thermae was devoid of religious observance, it may only be because the water was piped in. Statues of the gods added to the luxurious ambience of Roman baths, but they seem not to have been objects of veneration. This paper suggests that their presence may allude to a more complex and much older synthesis of healing, bathing and religious devotion.

Lfe Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Especificos, 1998

Within the historical studies of the English language, only the literary genre has been traditionally under the spotlight. However, there is a numher of texts which still remain virtually unstudied, at least, as far as their internal structure is concerned. Nevertheless, studies on this particular matter by Manfred Górlach, and Paivi Pahta have enjoyed some attention. In this paper, I present the analysis of the recipes contained in Yale MS 47 (ff 60r-71v) pointing out the structure of the texts, and the different linguistic devices used in the different parts of the medical recipe. ' I would like to express my gratitude lo Dr Mercedes Cabrera for the painstaking work of reading earlier drafts of this paper. ^ A comprehensiva discussion of gynaecological and obstetrical manuscripts in Middle English is given by Monica Green (1992). This American scholar classifies the manuscripts ' Abbreviations have been silently expanded in all examples of this paper. Word for word translation offered. Translation mine.

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.

Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, 2017

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter and David Trotter (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 220-31, 2009

Now that a fair amount of Anglo-Norman medical literature has been edited (most of it by the Oxford scholar, Tony Hunt), it is possible to give some assessment of the genesis of this unusually early corpus of vernacular medical writing. Like the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus before it, the Anglo-Norman corpus makes a fundamentally Mediterranean system of medicine accessible to readers (and auditors) in the north. In fact, England was one of the biggest markets for southern Italian medicine in the 12th and 13th centuries: of all the Latin medical works circulating in this period, whether new compositions and translations or old classics, England had copies of well over half. Therefore, it becomes of interest to see which of those many works were chosen for translation into the vernacular. Although works of basic therapeutic utility like Roger of Frugardi’s *Chirurgia* and Johannes Platearius’s *Practica brevis* are known in unique copies, the field most represented in Anglo-Norman medical literature is women’s medicine: gynecology and cosmetics. The gynecological texts are all translations of some form or another of the so-called *Trotula* text, which came out of 12th-century Salerno, specifically the *Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum* (Book on Women’s Conditions). Likewise, the two known cosmetics works have clear signs of derivation from southern Italian practices. I hypothesize that these works may have been commissioned by women, who knew of the medical lore coming out of southern Italy through a variety of Norman contacts. Just how new works in “the French of England” interacted with older Anglo-Saxon terminology is an issue still in need of investigation.

Modern Philology, 2022

The Medieval Review, 2023

In this article we combine the perspective of medieval urban hygiene and the fi ndings of medical and intellectual historians by tracing some ways in which medieval urban residents and governments attempted to limit disease and promote health by recourse to preventative measures. In both of the urban regions and domains in focus, namely Italian streets and Dutch bathhouses, considerable thought had been put into reducing the health risks perceived as attending upon them, at times devising arguments and procedures that possibly refl ect insights from prevailing medical theories and the advice of practitioners. We suggest that the relation between medical learning and health practices was more complex than a trickledown process, and analyze them in the context of pre-modern "healthscaping": a physical, social, legal, administrative, and political process by which urban individuals, groups, and especially governments sought to safeguard and improve collective wellbeing.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2008

Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and 'fast-track' Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. The Directors of the IAS -Veronica Strang, Stuart Elden, Barbara Graziosi and Martin Ward -also invite submissions from others involved in the themes, events and activities of the IAS. Insights is edited for the IAS by Barbara Graziosi.

A medieval English text on the theory and practice of uroscopic analysis is found in British Library, Sloane MS 280, and Cambridge, St. John's College MS B.16. The treatise, the title of which is given in the fuller and earlier copy in Sloane 280 as "Barton's Urines Which He Treated at Tilney," offers an unusual mix of practical diagnostic methodology focused mainly on uroscopy, and a conceptual framework for that methodology which begins with humoral physiological theory but continues with digressions on astronomy, the calendar, Aristotelian psychology, reproductive anatomy and physiology, embryology and ensoulment. This paper discusses the possible authorship and dating of the original text, the author's intellectual interests and habits, his approach to his vernacular audience, and the relation of the treatise to the Latin authorities on which it draws, particularly but not exclusively Isaac Israeli and Giles of Corbeil.