Beyond the Medical Text: Health and Illness in Early Medieval Italian Sources

Abstract

The vast majority of surviving evidence for health care, medicine and attitudes to illness in early medieval northern Italy comes not from traditional medical texts, but legal, hagiographical and archaeological sources. The political history of Italy, following the formal end of the Western Empire in AD 476, was complex. One consequence of this was that the law codes applied were dependent on how the individual was defined ethnically rather than on political territories: this makes for a rich and varied source for the history of health and illness. I argue that law-makers sought to include rather than exclude or marginalise the sick from social and legal transactions. Using the ninth-century legal official Petrus of Niviano as a case study, I show that, in the hands of a high-status individual at least, this inclusion could become a reality rather than simply a pious intention by early medieval rulers.