Many difficulties remain, but the focus is at least clear. Stray fragments apart, Anglo-Saxonists have to work with a substantial corpus of around 500 folios but embodying only five major works, three of which survive in unique manuscripts. There is an instructive contrast between the vigour of work on medicine in Old English and the more diffused efforts of those dealing with continental European medicine. My inspiration has been the Anglo-Saxonists. But it is an attempt to address some problems of interpretation. What follows is not a replacement narrative. This is a speciality in which there has been no accessible synthesis since 1937. The outcome of all this is a field in which, by comparison with classical antiquity or the later Middle Ages, few scholars work a field (I shall suggest) detached from wider currents in the historiography of the period above all, a field that has no master narrative, however provisional, except a negative one defined in such prejudicial terms as ‘decline’ or ‘lack’, and coloured by nostalgia. In addition, what we read often raises in acute form such vexed categories as ‘magic’, ‘science’, ‘religion’ and their interrelations. The most basic terms we want to deploy-‘text’, ‘use’, even ‘medicine’-are all problematic. We lack that kind of ‘sociological’ evidence. We cannot readily supply any given text with a clear personal context in the wider history of medicine and healing. 7 This is, secondly, because it is hard to reconstruct the conditions in which the manuscripts were produced and read.
#Medieval manuscripts on fighting big animals how to
Unsurprisingly, then, we do not quite know how to edit or read them. And yet, as we shall see, their texts so often resist our attempts to work with them as individuals, and to generalise about them as a corpus. 6 These manuscripts seem to be the fullest representation we have of the medicine of the age. The main one comes from the surviving manuscripts-well over 160 of them. Those challenges take three forms: textual, sociological, conceptual. Any discussion of early medieval medicine must face the challenges that they and their kind present-newts and all. 5 Among the Latin texts are our canine oracles. With the important exception of the Old English, the vernacular material is negligible in size. 700–1000 that is, predominantly, Carolingian and post-Carolingian Europe. By early medieval medicine, I mean the medicine of western Europe in the period c. 4 This medicine still needs defending.ĭefinitions first. Baader is only a few degrees milder in his vocabulary than those historians of the last century who saw in early medieval medical texts, with their supposedly mindless copying of sterile formulae, clear signs of cultural deliquescence. These are ‘anonymous Vulgar Latin texts’ (though, mercifully, not the one just summarised) ‘full of superstition and folk medicine’. 3 But why does it elicit epithets like ‘deplorable’ from scholars? In the essay quoted above, Gerhard Baader's exposition is dotted with verdicts such as ‘primitive’ and ‘unsophisticated’ and references to ‘low standards’. What is wrong with early medieval medicine? Such material might perpetuate its ‘eye-of-newt’ image among the general public. If the dog eats the lard, the patient will live. One of them requires wiping the sick person with a lump of lard and throwing it to a dog in an unfamiliar neighbourhood (or an unfamiliar dog: the Latin is ambiguous).
Alternative techniques immediately follow.
2 ‘Take the tick of a black dog in the left hand and go into the sick room, and if, when the sick man sees you, he turns himself towards you, non euadit ’. ‘If one surveys the state of medical knowledge in late antiquity and in the early Middle Ages in Western Europe, it is deplorable.' 1How to tell if a sick person will die? One way was copied somewhere in France around the year 800. Early Middle Ages, manuscripts, prognosis, materia medica
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