Catherine Rider

This paper examines the discussions of 'magical' cures found in thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century English pastoral manuals (texts designed to teach the clergy how to preach and hear confessions). It discusses these writers' attitudes to spoken and written charms and non-verbal amulets, and compares them with a selection of charms and amulets found in contemporary medical texts. The paper discusses the reasons why authors of pastoral manuals condemned certain kinds of cure as 'magical', and argues that they were more concerned about cures that involved words than about non-verbal amulets. It also argues that a significant number, although not all, of the charms described in thirteenth-century medical texts would have been acceptable to many authors of pastoral manuals.

An annotated translation of Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542), with a scholarly introduction showing its great importance in the intellectual history of the Renaissance. The only sixteenth-century writer, apart from Paracelsus, to develop a new theory of disease, Fernel was also a leading natural philosopher. His survey of the role of occult qualities and powers in life processes, especially generation, and in contagious and pestilential diseases draws upon astrology, alchemy, and other occult sciences. Although an original and innovatory thinker, Fernel operated within the parameters of Aristotelian and Galenic philosophy, while drawing upon Platonic, Stoic and other worldviews. Accordingly, this book shows the continued vitality in traditional thought in the period just before the Scientific Revolution.

... Franciscan literature of religious instruction before the Council of Trent. By Bert Roest. (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 117.) Pp. xxi+673. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2004. €179. 90 04 14026 3; 1573 5664. CATHERINE RIDER a1 a1 CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, ...

Abstract This paper examines the discussions of 'magical'cures found in thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century English pastoral manuals (texts designed to teach the clergy how to preach and hear confessions). It discusses these writers' attitudes to spoken and written ...

This paper will explore the ways in which medieval English couples are presented as responding to infertility, focusing particularly on the relationship between medical and non-medical responses.  It will look at the way infertility is presented in two kinds of text: medical recipes, which offer cures for infertility, and miracle narratives in which couples experiencing reproductive problems are said to have had a child after appealing to a saint.  Although these sources cannot be taken as simple records of real couples’ experiences, they can suggest the ways in which their authors imagined how couples would experience and respond to infertility. Medical recipes survive in large numbers from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and they tell us about which medical problems childlessness was associated with (failure to conceive, failure to beget, repeated miscarriage, menstrual problems) and about what a couple who sought medical advice might encounter, such as tests to see whether the problem lies with the man or woman, and a wide range of remedies both cheap and expensive.  They also shed light on who was deemed responsible for seeking treatment: the man, the woman, or the couple jointly.  Miracle narratives from late medieval England relating to childlessness are fewer in number but they offer a different perspective on the same issues.  This paper will therefore explore where medicine fits into a broader possible set of responses to infertility.

This paper will examine medieval attitudes to illnesses caused by magic.  This topic has received comparatively little attention from medievalists, although studies of early modern witch trials often touch on it.  The paper will therefore seek to establish how much of a concern magically caused illnesses were, in a period which did not see large-scale witch trials.  If medieval people were not very worried about illnesses caused by magic, why might this have been?  The paper will also use medieval medical texts to uncover how physicians understood the role of magic in causing illness.  When they discussed impotence, a significant number of medical writers gave remedies to cure impotence caused by magic, or to ward off magic and demons more generally.  These remedies were often drawn from classical or late antique scientific texts such as the works of Pliny and Dioscorides but the ways in which they were compiled, copied and added to in the later Middle Ages (and beyond) have received little attention.  I will therefore look at what these medical texts can tell us about understandings of illness and healing which were rarely mentioned by educated medical writers, but which had a place in authoritative written texts and probably also in medieval society more generally.

This paper will examine the remedies suggested by late medieval medical writers to cure magically caused or demonic illnesses, or to ward off demons more generally.  Demons did not occupy a large place in medieval learned medicine, and medical writers often preferred to focus on the physical causes of illness, but they did sometimes suggest remedies against demons, particularly when they discussed male impotence which, it was widely believed, could be caused by magic.  Thus influential medical texts such as the late eleventh-century Pantegni of Constantine the African and the thirteenth-century Poor Men’s Treasure of Petrus Hispanus listed a range of ways of repelling demons.  These remedies were often drawn from classical or late antique scientific texts such as the works of Pliny and Dioscorides but the ways in which they were compiled, copied and added to in the later Middle Ages (and beyond) have received little attention.  This paper will discuss what these remedies against demons can tell us about understandings of illness and healing which were rarely mentioned by educated medical writers, but which had a place in authoritative written texts and probably also in medieval society more generally.

Studies of infertility in the modern world have often argued that the condition has become increasingly ‘medicalized’, seen as a problem which should be understood in medical terms and treated by medical practitioners.  However, the extent of this medicalization in earlier centuries is debated.  This paper will examine the evidence for medical responses to infertility in medieval England, focusing particularly on medical encyclopaedias (practicae) and recipe collections.  How far was infertility regarded as a matter for medical treatment, and how accessible would university medicine have been?  Was medicine regarded as a successful way of treating infertility?  What were the experiences of the men and women who sought medicines to help them conceive?  These questions are difficult to answer for the Middle Ages but encyclopaedias and recipes give some hints.  Several medieval English medical writers, such as John of Gaddesden and John of Arderne, claimed to have treated infertility and other problems of the reproductive organs, or to have seen other practitioners treat these cases, and their comments shed light on how medical practitioners viewed their role in treating infertility.  Medical recipe collections also included recipes to help conception, and these less specialist works give some indication of how a wider range of literate people viewed the role of medicine in cases of infertility.