A time when butchers and executioners knew more about anatomy than university-trained physicians – travel back to a time of such unlikely remedies as leeches, roasted cat and red bed-curtains

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The miasma theory, which was the prevailing theory in medieval Europe, stated that diseases arose from bad smells. Medieval physicians and scholars believed that diseases were caused by foul airs, and therefore, they would often force local residents to clear away their waste. #2 The disease Rhazes wrote about in the tenth century was similar to chicken pox. He thought that people’s basic constitutions determined whether they suffered from smallpox or measles. #3 The first known disease that afflicted humans was the plague, which was spread by fleas. It was first diagnosed in 1414 in Paris, and was believed to be caused by dying flowers. #4 The Black Death, also known as the Plague of Justinian, was a disease that swept through Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. It was brought to England by the Romans, and it was also known as the Plague of Cadwalader’s Time in Ireland.

“A lovely, witty treasure trove of a book, spilling over with historical gems . . . a very human history: sometimes weird, always wonderful.” —Dan Jones, New York Times-bestselling author Have you ever found yourself watching a show or reading a novel and wondering what life was really like in the Middle Ages? What did people actually eat? Were they really filthy? And did they ever get to marry for love? In Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, you’ll find fast and fun answers to all your secret questions, from eating and drinking to sex and love. Find out whether people bathed, what they did when they got sick, and what actually happened to people accused of crimes. Learn about medieval table manners, tournaments, and toothpaste, and find out if people really did poop in the moat. “To say that this book was fun to read would be an understatement. Cybulskie’s knowledge radiates in every page of this short book . . . It was educational and entertaining all at the same time. Simply a wonderful resource for novice medievalists and writers of historical fiction and nonfiction alike.” —Adventures of a Tudor Nerd “All in all, this is an excellent book to put to bed many of the myths surrounding medieval existence that persist in the popular imagination. Easy to read and well worth the time to read it. I highly recommend this book if you want to get a mostly unbiased view of medieval life.” —Battles and Book Reviews

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.

The perfect almanac for lovers of all things medieval