Introduction

Summary

Preoccupations with the body in the twenty-first century have led to a growing interest in the intersections between literature, religion and the history of medicine, and, more specifically, how they converge within a given culture. In her plenary lecture delivered at the 2012 conference at Swansea University entitled ‘Cure and Care: Diseases, Disabilities and Therapies’, Professor Monica Green, a leading historian of medieval medicine, not only emphasised the importance of a continued historical perspective but also called for active dialogue and concerted multi-disciplinary approaches in order to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of the social and cultural factors of disease, both modern and premodern. In response to such imperatives, this volume comprises a collection of essays exploring the ways in which aspects of medieval culture were predicated upon an interaction between medical and religious discourses, particularly those inflected by contemporary gendered ideologies. Indeed, during the Middle Ages there was frequently a fusion of such discourses, one that became increasingly fissured within post- Enlightenment contexts – to the extent that it has become largely lost to us today. During the medieval period, however, the inseparability of bodily and spiritual concerns was paramount, as displayed in the Church's dominance over all issues concerning sickness, health, life, death and the salvation of all individual souls. This inseparability is witnessed clearly in medical and devotional texts of all types and genres during the period: such texts interrelate thematically, entering into dialogue with one another by means of powerful metaphors linked to cultural and religious norms. Medieval socioreligious culture, therefore, offers an ideal site for an investigation into such a close cohabitation of religious and medical discourses, along with the mentalites this produced.

The overarching aim of this volume is to investigate this interaction of medieval medicine and religion in the Middle Ages, taking its lead from those scholars working in the Early Modern period who have already made some inroads into examining the time immediately preceding the emergence of the stark dichotomous separation of literature and science that characterised the eighteenth century. For example, in her article, ‘Literature and Medicine: Traditions and Innovations’, Anne Hudson Jones argues that the fields of literature and medicine share a number of common themes and foci: illness, suffering, death, healers, physician-writers, to name but a few, as well as their common depiction of literature as a healing mechanism.