5 - Souls and Bodies

Summary

This chapter is concerned with medicine of words rather than deeds, though, as we shall see, these words had to do with exhorting, persuading and encouraging patients and others to take charge of their lives or fulfil their responsibilities rather than with speculation or doctrinal issues. It will explore the overlap between medicine and religion in discourses of counsel or advice addressed to lay people and to clergy. This overlap occurs across a range of different kinds of writing. Some of the various forms these discourses took (from the thirteenth century to the dissolution) were: the writing of pastoralia about preaching and confession; penitential literature aimed at lay folk; advice to princes about conduct, diet and exercise; and general regimens of health. For the most part, the authors of these writings I will be considering here were friars.

The range of roles friars undertook as preachers, confessors, teachers and advisors to eminent people encouraged the creation of a similar variety of texts of counsel. But separating out those discourses concerned with spiritual as opposed to those concerned with bodily matters (salus animae vs sanitas corporis) is not always straightforward. In part, this is because texts were multivalent. To take an example: was the De proprietatibus rerum, an encyclopedic survey of things created by God, written c. 1240 by Bartholomaeus Anglicus OFM, read as a help to interpretation of the scriptures, as a source for figurae and exempla to be used in friars’ sermons, or as a guide to conduct and bodily health for all? The reason for the extraordinary success of this text in England, measured by its appearance in libraries and citation in everything from scholastic commentaries to recipes, is surely that it could be read in all three ways (and indeed in other ways too). Different books of the complete work by Bartholomaeus were useful for different kinds of reading. The same might be said for the new edition made by Roger Bacon OFM of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum in the 1270s. This work, translated from an Islamicate original, purported to be ethical, political and medical advice from Aristotle to Alexander; it dated from thirty to forty years after De proprietatibus rerum.