Cangemi, Luthien; (2024) The Art of Healing in Medieval Iceland: Old Norse cultural perspectives on illness and health and its debt to the English medical tradition. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores Icelandic medical manuscripts in the context of a pan-European medicine, offering insights into the development of a medical culture in medieval Iceland through the contacts with the medical theories and practices originated in the Continent and in England. Old Norse medicine, as evidenced by medieval Icelandic manuscripts, reveals the ability of local healers and scribes to borrow medical material from the Continent and the British Isles. They merged these materials with medical theories and practices that medieval Icelanders developed independently. The thesis explores how imported materials have been assimilated and re-elaborated within the medieval Icelandic cultural framework. The thesis analyses the surviving manuscripts thematically, providing insights into the exchange with Continental medicine and with Christian liturgy through the reading of a group of remedies working around the power of the words (charms, incantations and prayers) and the relationship between medicine, magic and religion. Furthermore, the thesis provides a reading of the surviving Icelandic medical remedies and their debts to the medical culture developed in England between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. In doing so, the thesis expands upon the influence exerted by English medical collections such as the Old English Herbarium and the Lacnunga in relation to developing a cognitive framework to better understand bodily effects of illness, and in relation to herbal and animal product remedies. This research will offer insights into the cognitive parallel between the Old English ælfe and mære and the Old Norse counterparts álfar and mara in medical culture, shedding light on how the Old English medical conceptions of ælfe and mære shaped the development of Old Norse álfar and mara in medical remedies and literature. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that medieval Iceland developed a medical culture through the combination of imported and local medical practices, theories and beliefs and that medieval England played a more important role than scholarship has acknowledged.

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