Treating Magical Illnesses in the Middle Ages

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.