The study of premodern medical humanities has shown how seemingly disparate modern categories of religion and science were integrated concepts for the men and women of medieval Europe. Local scientific and supernatural specialists developed pharmaceutical miracles and saintly salves to cure the sick and ensure the public health of communities long before the common understanding of microbial life. Rather than dismiss premodern healthcare as quaint, magical, or mere folk practice, this panel takes the texts and materials of the Middle Ages at face value to learn how medieval physicians and their patients understood disease within their own cultural milieu and the ways in which they articulated that knowledge to cure both body and soul.

The three papers assembled in this session investigate sacred and secular overlaps in medicine and culture from the early to late Middle Ages with a focus on medieval Christianity. Taking health and healing as their points of departure, the panelists each approach the human side of medicine from different yet related academic angles, including material history, manuscript studies, and women’s health. All three panelists draw from similar sources across time and place—such as medieval saints’ lives, medical manuscripts and their interpolations, and Christian liturgical handbooks—to consider how the scholarly understanding of medieval medicine must also include the religious worldview of physicians and patients. Physical ailments could not be cured without considering spiritual health, and the sacraments and saints also required physical materials and bodily remedies drawn from contemporary medical practice.

Carolyn Twomey comes to medieval medical humanities from a material approach to the history of religion and liturgy. She shows how dependent Christian ceremonial rites were on local and imported medical materials in early medieval England, specifically how the sensory and physical experiences of the Christian rite of baptism incorporated familiar materials of bodily healing, such as salt, from medical manuals. With a similar liturgical focus, Claire Burridge’s paper shows how tenth-century scribes at a German monastery added medical ingredients and recipes to a then hundred-year-old priest’s handbook. Her close study of this one manuscript provides a jumping off point from which to consider not only the long unfinished lives and afterlives of medieval manuscripts, but also how concerns for spiritual penance and salvation were linked to curing the body on the continent. Angela Bolen’s paper considers the meanings of the body to focus on women’s health and female saints in high and late Middle Ages. Bringing together well-known medieval medical and saintly compendia, she investigates how amenorrhea—the cessation of menstruation—was understood to be both a known disease as well as a sign of female sanctity and purification in medieval Europe.