Drawing upon a surprising wealth of evidence found in surviving manuscripts, this book restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care. Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late medieval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders. This book restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

An examination of how academic colleges commemorated their patrons in a rich variety of ways. WINNER of a 2019 Cambridgeshire Association for Local History award. The people of medieval Cambridge chose to be remembered after their deaths in a variety of ways - through prayers, Masses and charitable acts, and bytomb monuments, liturgical furnishings and other gifts. The colleges of the university, alongside their educational role, arranged commemorative services for their founders, fellows and benefactors. Together with the town's parishchurches and religious houses, the colleges provided intercessory services and resting places for the dead. This collection explores how the myriad of commemorative enterprises complemented and competed as locations where the living and the dead from "town and gown" could meet. Contributors analyse the commemorative practices of the Franciscan friars, the colleges of Corpus Christi, Trinity Hall and King's, and within Lady Margaret Beaufort's Cambridge household; the depictions of academic and legal dress on memorial brasses, and the use and survival of these brasses. The volume highlights, for the first time, the role of the medieval university colleges within the family ofcommemorative institutions; in offering a new and broader view of commemoration across an urban environment, it also provides a rich case-study for scholars of the medieval Church, town, and university. JOHN S. LEE is Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York; CHRISTIAN STEER is Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of History, University of York. Contributors: Sir John Baker, Richard Barber, Claire GobbiDaunton, Peter Murray Jones, Elizabeth A. New, Susan Powell, Michael Robson, Nicholas Rogers.