Bodies of Knowledge: Cultural Interpretations of Illness and Medicine in Medieval Europe

Studies in Early Medicine originated in a series of workshops on Disease and Disability in Early Medieval Europe held at the Universities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Oxford from 2005-2009. The social dimension of medical practice was a key theme at the Disease and Disability in Medieval Europe workshops, and it is this theme the papers in this first volume of Studies in Early Medicine seek to address. Contents: 1: Introduction (Sally Crawford and Christina Lee); 2) Rage Possession: A Cognitive Science Approach to Early English Demon Possession (Kirsten C. Uszkalo); 3) Outlawry and Moral Perversion in Old Norse Society (Anne Irene Riis); 4) Hermaphroditism in the western Middle Ages: Physicians, Lawyers and the Intersexed Person (Irina Metzler); 5) The nadir of Western Medicine? Texts, contexts and practice in Anglo-Saxon England (Sally Crawford); 6) This should not to be shown to a gentile: MedicoMagical Texts in Medieval Franco-German Jewish Rabbinic Manuscripts (Ephraim Shoham-Steiner); 7) Asclepius, Biographical Dictionaries, and the transmission of science in the Medieval Muslim World (Keren Abbou Hershkovits).