Wounds in the Middle Ages ed. by Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr (review)

Ten essays bring expertise in both the humanities and the sciences to bear on the title topic, Wounds in the Middle Ages. In their Introduction, the editors, Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr, note the many significances of wounds, not only Christ’s crucifixion wounds and their devotional-text setting, but wounds in the military, medical, or theological spheres, they, too, associated with particular texts.

Part I’s single essay is a medical overview, John Clasper’s ‘The Management of Military Wounds in the Middle Ages’. It begins with the wound itself, explaining the usual treatment practices (washing, styptics, astringents, antiseptics, dressings) and the ways wounds heal. A history of wound management from antiquity to the thirteenth century follows, and then of the (partly overlapping) development of surgery in Europe. Clasper notes that ancient treatments, the basis of medieval surgeons’ management of wounds, were not without major debates (whether, for instance, pus was good or bad). He discusses the views of the most important surgeon–authors, such as Teodorico Borgognoni, Hugh of Lucca, Henri of Mondeville, and John Aderne, and concludes with a brief consideration of modern practices.

Part II contains two closely related essays. Warr considers medieval descriptions of stigmata and how they differed via two case studies: St Francis of Assisi and Lucia Brocadelli de Narni (d. 1544). Warr shows how knowledge of medical theory and practice relating to wounds was used in establishing supernatural or other agency. Louise Elizabeth Wilson examines ‘how medical practitioners engaged in the treatment of wounds were portrayed in the miracle accounts’ (p. 63). Using St Edmund’s miracles (Bibliothèque Municipale d’Auxerre, 123G), Wilson is alert to the challenges in assessing attitudes to the practitioners at a time when they were increasingly involved in civil law cases and canonisation procedures.

In Part III, ‘The Broken Body, The Broken Soul’, the implied connection is explored. Karine van ’t Land’s essay studies the learned medical perception of wounds as ‘a dissolution of the body’. She focuses investigation on one of the most influential treatises, the Canon of Avicenna (d. 1037), a translation of Ibn Sina’s Qanun. This study is valuable to many scholars, including those of the medieval Church: excommunications, for instance, listed many of the types of bodily dissolution mentioned here, such as the swellings on the skin, apostemata. M. K. K. Yearl’s stimulating contribution, addressing ‘theological medicine’, complements van ’t Land’s. Using the works of Hugh of Fouilloy (d. c. 1172), William of Saint-Thierry, and others, Yearl discusses their belief that man’s moral frailty originated in the body and was responsible for wounding the soul, thus suggesting that the views of early physicians and philosophers who did not make this connection were incomplete.

Part IV’s two essays are only loosely linked. Hannah Priest chooses Chrétien’s Eric et Enide to assess the role of wounds in the construction of chivalric masculinity, and the intersection of that role with the (non-medical) discourse surrounding the wounds of Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’. Jenny Benham looks at wounding and recompense or punishment in Scandinavian and English medieval law and legal practice, although again, literary texts are as involved in the discussion as legal records.

Part V, ‘Wound Surgery in the Fourteenth Century’, heads two essays on aspects of this topic. Benhams’s legal essay would sit better with the first of these, John Naylor’s well-structured ‘Medicine for Surgical Practice in Fourteenth-Century England: The Judgement against John le Spicer’. Naylor looks most perceptively at the evidence for the London coroner’s verdict of professional neglect in the case of a facial wound in 1353. Maria Patijn’s ‘The Medical Crossbow from Jan Yperman to Isaak Koedijck’, by contrast, might have been better placed after Clasper’s chapter on military wounds. For Patijn reports on the Flemish physician, Jan Yperman (d...