Health and the Body in Early Medieval England

This Element considers how cultural preoccupations with bodily wholeness and fleshly functionalities shaped medicine, law, and literature.

This Element explores ideas about the sick and healthy body in early medieval England, proposing that Old English texts offer coherent ideas about how human bodies work and how disease operates. It offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to medical practice and writing in England before the Norman Conquest.This Element explores ideas about the sick and healthy body in early medieval England from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, proposing that surviving Old English texts offer consistent and coherent ideas about how human bodies work and how disease operates. A close examination of these texts illuminates the ways early medieval people thought about their embodied selves and the place of humanity in a fallen world populated by hostile supernatural forces. This Element offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to medical practice and writing in England before the Norman Conquest, draws on dozens of remedies, charms, and prayers to illustrate cultural concepts of sickness and health, provides a detailed discussion of the way impairment and disability were treated in literature and experienced by individuals, and concludes with a case study of a saint who died of a devastating illness while fighting demons in the fens of East Anglia.