Medicine and religion were intertwined in the middle ages; here are studies of specific instances. The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies. The book reflects the extraordinary advances which 'pure' history of medicine has made in the last twenty years: there is medicine at the levels of midwife and village practitioner, the sweep of the learned Greek and Latin tradition of over a millennium; there is control of midwifery by the priest, therapy through liturgy, medicine as an expression of religious life for heretics, medicine invading theologians' discussion of earthly paradise; and so on. Professor PETER BILLER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York; Dr JOSEPH ZIEGLER teaches in the Department of History at the University of Haifa.Contributors JOSEPH ZIEGLER, PEREGRINE HORDEN, KATHRYNTAGLIA, JESSALYN BIRD, PETER BILLER, DANIELLE JACQUART, MICHAEL McVAUGH, MAAIKE VAN DER LUGT, WILLIAM COURTENAY, VIVIAN NUTTON.

This book describes the medical world of the early fourteenth century through a study of the extensive archival material and contemporary writings which exist for eastern Spain in the decades before the Black Death. It describes the range of medical practice which then existed - a continuum ranging from scattered academic physicians to barbers and empirics - and gives evidence for the levels and numerical growth of these various occupations in early fourteenth-century communities (although it also emphasizes that occupational distinctions were not yet sharply drawn). The newly translated Greco-Arabic medical learning was beginning to spread through this continuum of practice, and the book argues that public enthusiasm for the new learned medicine led to the ‘medicalization’ of certain social and legal institutions, thus preparing a role for a medical profession in this society before its physicians had shown any consciousness of collective self-interest and identity.