Medieval Medicine: Theory and Practice

Extract

This special issue has its origins in two one-day workshops held in 2007–8, the first on Medicine in the Earlier Middle Ages, organised by Clare Pilsworth and Debby Banham at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Manchester University in 2007, and the second on Disease and Disability in the Middle Ages at Rewley House, Oxford, organised by Sally Crawford, Christina Lee and Robert Arnott in 2008. Iona McCleery's contribution and April Harper's were originally presented in a session organised by McCleery herself on the ‘Medical Turn’ at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July 2007. All these meetings had a common aim: to bring together scholars working on areas of health care and medicine in the Middle Ages in the West.

Unlike most collections of papers on medieval medicine, this volume devotes more space to the earlier than to the later parts of the period. This is because the editors, both early medievalists ourselves, are keen to redress the chronological bias in the existing published scholarship, and indeed to remind readers outside our immediate field that there actually was an early Middle Ages, which was not just earlier than, but different from, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.