Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and the Body in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Anni Hella, Anu Korhonen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040835951
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: History

Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe explores the rich cultural history of bodily experience through diverse case studies spanning from Italy to Sweden and from England to the Levant.

How did medieval and early modern Europeans experience and understand sickness and health? How did they interact with health professionals and authorities, and which cultural and social networks shaped their understanding of wellness and illness? Drawing from extensive primary sources, this book examines how people of the past navigated their bodies' vulnerabilities both at home and abroad. It reveals how they consulted and challenged medical and civic authorities while seeking both physical and spiritual healing through religious practice.

Covering a broad temporal span from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, this collection of essays reimagines the role of material bodies and their social and emotional significance in medieval and early modern cultural history. The work offers fresh insights into the intersection of medicine, culture, and society across five centuries of European experience.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Perceptions, practices and experiences of health in late medieval and early modern Europe
• 1 Sacramentals, relics, healing and superstition in the late Middle Ages
• 2 A healing ointment of two saint-candidates: Medicine or religious relic?
• 3 Strong feelings, weak medicine: Two noble deaths in sixteenth-century Rome
• 4 Midwives in the neighbourhood in Rome circa 1600: History from fragments
• 5 Making medicine measurable: Debating mathematical medicine in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century
• 6 From demonic possession to contagious afflictions: The medico-theological worldview and practice of an eighteenth-century Swedish physician
• 7 Inscribing the town on women’s bodies: Public health and public order in eighteenth-century Aberdeen
• 8 ‘Put someone else in my place, since I am ill’: Health issues at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–39)
• 9 ‘Corrupted stomackes’: Ailing British bodies in the Levant, c. 1600
• 10 Alice Thornton’s torments: Experiencing pain in seventeenth-century England
• 11 ‘Wm: is but poorly’: Fortitude, family, and faith in the face of illness
• Contributors
• Index