Early medieval medicine: how a new corpus of manuscripts is transforming the field

Abstract

Thanks to the work of several generations of scholars, there has never been a greater interest in early medieval medicine. Yet the field, which continues to be largely manuscript-based given the sheer number of unedited texts, remains tethered to two now-outdated manuscript catalogues that collectively record 225 Latin manuscripts containing medical writings produced before ca. 1100. The Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM) has recently completed a handlist of early medieval manuscripts with medical texts that do not feature in the earlier catalogues, more than doubling the total number of witnesses up to the year 1000. These findings have far-reaching implications, and this article offers a series of case studies that illustrate how the handlist, in concert with a reassessment of definitions and categorizations in the field, is transforming our understanding of early medieval medicine.