Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM)

Dr James Palmer

Co-Applicants: Dr Carine van Rhijn and Dr Claire Burridge

University of St Andrews

Early medieval medicine in the Latin West was long seen as ‘deplorable’ and monastic. Only recently has it started to be analysed in relation to wider cultural and intellectual developments. Yet the field is still fundamentally defined by the corpus of 225 early medical manuscripts as catalogued by Beccaria (1956) and Wickersheimer (1966). Since 2020, however, our project has identified approximately 250 further manuscripts from the period containing medical texts. These exciting findings open new perspectives on medicine between Antiquity and the high-medieval Salerno School which transform our understanding of the evolution of medical knowledge and the contexts in which it was recorded.

To widen access to this material and lay the groundwork for future research, we aim to:

1. Produce a new, comprehensive manuscript catalogue and online handlist,
2. Publish editions and translations of previously unedited recipe collections
3. Publish a ‘minigraph’ introductory volume for the field.