Medicine without doctors: sexuality, sleep and sound mind.

Determinants of health in medieval vernacular remedy tradition.
Post-doctoral research project, funded by the Academy of Finland 2012-2015

Susanna Niiranen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

When public health care was nearly inexistent and physicians were scarce, health and wellbeing were in the hands of diverse healers. In the Middle ages, healing and care were provided in domestic sphere and in monasteries, but also in towns and villages by more or less professional practicians, such as priests, clerks, notaries, apothecaries, midwives, textile artisans, pepperers, herbalists, itinerant drink sellers and bone-settlers.

Plenty of medicines, cures and therapies have survived in written medicinal recipe collections. In this project, I focus on recipe collections written in vernacular languages which often represent a more popular register than theoretical university medicine. However, genres often overlap in medical recipes and I regard recipe collections as a crossroads atwhich various cultural aspects (traditionally described by such pairs as high-low, professional-lay, learned-popular, written-oral, Latin-vernacular) encounter one another.

The project attempts to complement the image of medieval medical knowledge focusing on three conditions releaving medic(in)al attitudes towards the relation between illness and health, normality and deviancy: sexuality, sleep and mental health. This is done in the context of res non-naturales or determinants of health, a concept related to a well-known medical theory. In standard medieval form, determinants of health included climate; food and drink; movement and rest; sleep and wakefulness; elimination and retention; and the emotions. Coitus and bathing were often added to the list. The question goes: are these notions similar in a more popular register which vernacular medicine often represents? If so, what does it tell about medieval healing practices? And what does it tell about transmission of knowledge and medieval text production?

Related publications:

Niiranen, S. (2011). `The Authority of words. The healing power of vernacular, Latin and other languages in an. Occitan remedy collection.´ In Mirator vol. 12 http://www.glossa.fi/mirator/pdf/i-2011/theauthorityofwords.pdf

Niiranen, S. (2012). Äidiksi tulon pelkoja keskiajalla. [Pain, sorrow and shame. Fear of maternity in the Middle Ages]. In P. Saarimäki, H. Niskanen, & K.-M. Hytönen (Eds.), Lapsi matkalla maailmaan [The child en route to the world]. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, pp. 51–81.

Niiranen, S. (2013). Healing words. Cultural and linguistic co-existence through word magic in Occitan medical recipes of the thirteenth century. Coexistence and cooperation in the middle ages. IV European Congress of Medieval Studies F.I.D.E.M. (Federation Internationale des Instituts d’Études Medievales), Palermo 23-37 june 2009, a cura di A. Musco e G. Musotto, Officina di Studi Medievali, Palermo 2012,  pp. 979–992.

Forthcoming:

Niiranen, S. Mental disorders in late medieval remedy collections: a comparison of Occitan and Swedish material. In Mental (Dis)orders in the late Middle Ages. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa & Susanna Niiranen (eds.). Brill: Leiden.