This essay details the foundational place of affect for medical treatments of body and soul in the late Middle Ages. Because the medieval soul was fully embodied, affects of love, joy, fear, and anger played a practical part in diagnosing or treating a patient’s health. In late medieval medical manuals, along with forms of living and confessional forms, care for bodies and souls draws on a common affective vocabulary. Rather than seeing one form of affective discourse as spiritual and the other as practical, this chapter concludes by briefly turning to the Book of Margery Kempe to take seriously her claim that Christ heals via an affective intensity that transforms her body and soul. The therapeutic domain of affect unites body and soul, spiritual and practical, in late medieval medical writings.

Amīn al-Dawla Ibn al-Tilmīdh (d. 1165) was born in Baghdad into a family of Christian physicians. He served several Abbasid caliphs, who entrusted him with high-ranking positions, such as that of ‘head of physicians’ of his hometown. He wrote about twenty books and treatises, including a renowned dispensatory. In this chapter I examine Ibn al-Tilmīdh’s little-known work on simple drugs, the Kitāb quwā l-adwiyah (Book on the Faculties of Simple Drugs). The text consists of 287 entries on medicinal plants, minerals, and a few animal products. Each entry is divided into five sections, dedicated respectively to synonyms, descriptions, ‘faculties’, benefits of the simple drug, and its use in compound remedies. The most interesting of these sections is the first, as Ibn al-Tilmīdh not only gave the usual Arabic names of plants and minerals and their synonyms there, but also regularly listed the Syriac, Persian, and Greek names of the drugs.

This essay approaches the vernacular style of Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1379) through his Dominican order’s preoccupation with a properly calibrated preacher’s style. Good preachers must strike a balance to communicate their learning, but never obscurely; to speak plainly but not without grace. Thomas Waleys called this mode a grossus stilus, a simple style, and this is an aptly gross name for Daniel’s way with Middle English, as he instructs his readers in the medieval art of inspecting urine for medical diagnosis. I contextualise Daniel’s own stylistic programme (as articulated in theory in his prologue and then proved in practice in the rest of the Liber) within a long tradition of literary theorising around jargon and plain speech found across the rhetorical manuals and guides to preaching of the Dominican curriculum. While they expressed their arguments in Latin, these texts offered a theory of vernacular eloquence that – as the Liber would prove – could circulate amongst the apparently disparate fields of preaching and Middle English medicine.

Chapter 5 examines Boccaccio’s authorial defenses in the Decameron in the light of medieval medical and literary prescriptions for lovesickness, such as those in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, and Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (which Boccaccio has been credited with translating). Like these didactic works, the Decameron can also be seen as teaching both how to recover from an unhappy love affair and how to procure a new liaison, thus aggravating the very ills that it is said to cure. Indeed, the book is presented metaphorically as fighting fire with fire, redressing unrequited desire by offering female readers the solace of a personal relationship with its author. But Boccaccio also recognizes that it useless to try to prevent sexual desire, and the cure may do more harm than good. The chapter’s second half examines stories that seem to draw on the dialogues between lovers of different social statuses in De amore. The attempted seductions are all unsuccessful in Andreas’ hypothetical encounters, but the corresponding novelle tend to end happily and to model healthier, more productive human relationships.

New cultural attitudes towards horticulture and gardening emerged in the early Middle Ages, and these structured the new economies and ways of life. From antiquity, land management was nested in several different clusters of ideas and values: ancient Roman cultural esteem placed upon effective estate management; emerging ideas about self-sufficiency of religious households, such as monasteries; and ideas about health and medicine. Some of these ideas were rooted in different genres of literature from antiquity, from agronomic treatises to medical theory, some of which were continued into the early Middle Ages. New, early medieval writings about monastic communities, about places where gardens grew, and about the use of plant material for medicines emerged. Each of these genres of writing is considered here for the light they shed on agricultural practices and consumption of urban produce. This chapter also considers the movement of cultivated urban spaces into ecclesiastical hands and explores how new cultural values attached to food provisioning for certain groups, such as the dedicated religious, informed habits of charitable or pro anima donations of cultivated land.