Caring for Body and Soul: The Addition of Medical Texts to Early Medieval Liturgical Collections and Pastoral Handbooks

Over the course of the tenth century, scribes at the monastery of Tegernsee added medical recipes to the margins of several folia within a late-ninth-century manuscript today held at the British Library, MS Add. 19725. This priests’ handbook contains a martyrology, penitentials, and other pastoral texts. Five different recipes were added to fol. 41r, a page from the penitential of Pseudo-Bede. While the appearance of medical recipes in this context may, at first glance, seem surprising, the penitential’s introduction compares the correction of sins through penance to the physical healing of medicines, thereby drawing a connection between caring for the body and soul. However, the margins surrounding the penitential’s introduction are empty, and the recipes in question were instead added several folia later, appearing on the page with the start of a section about doing penance for the sins of bestiality. Four of the five recipes concern veterinary medicine, offering treatments for sickly pigs, cows, and other livestock. Surely, this is no coincidence. The appearance of these recipes in a priests’ handbook provides one example of a much wider phenomenon in the early medieval Latin west: the addition of medical texts to non-medical manuscripts. This paper takes a closer look at a specific subset of cases, concentrating on the addition of medical recipes and incantations to liturgical compendia and pastoral handbooks. By focusing on this selection of material, the paper explores the relationships between the medical texts that were added and the codicological contexts in which they occur, asking: to what extent do the manuscripts’ primary content relate to the addition of medical content? And, where relationships are evident, do they suggest that scribes were intentionally linking the healing of body and soul, or are there more examples like MS Add. 19725 that speak to alternative motivations?