Main description:

The Middle Ages (c.500-c.1500) are wellknown 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.

Contents:

List of Illustrations
General Editors' Preface, Roger Cooter
Introduction: the Cultural History of Health, Iona McCleery
1 Environment: Managing Urban Sanitation for Sanitas, Dolly Jorgensen
2 Food: From Healthy Regimen to Consumption and Supply, Iona McCleery
3 Disease: Confronting, Consoling, and Constructing the Afflicted Body, Justin Stearns
4 Animals: Their Use and Meaning in Medieval Medicine, Kathleen Walker-Meikle
5 Objects: The Archaeology of Medieval Healing, Gemma L. Watson and Roberta Gilchrist
6 Experiences: Feeling Unhealthy in the Middle Ages, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi
7 Mind/Brain: Medieval Concepts, Wendy J. Turner
8 Authority: Trusting the Text in the Early Middle Ages, F. Eliza Glaze
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index