'Deliver This Horse from Evil': The Ritual Aspects of Responses to Veterinary Disease in the Late Middle Ages.

Abstract

While the importance of religious and magical healing practices in the Late Middle Ages is well established, the ritual aspects of veterinary medicine have so far not been thoroughly explored. This article addresses this lacuna through analysis of a corpus of charms, prayers, and other rituals that were used to cure a group of devastating contagious diseases that afflicted horses: animals that were often afforded complex, professional medical care in this period. It considers the semantic aspects and common features of this group of disease rituals alongside discussions of contagious illness in veterinary treatises, identifying a distinctive set of healing rituals and explaining why they were such a common response to enzootic disease. It argues that magical and religious healing were significant elements of medieval horse-care and that veterinary medicine has been overlooked as one of the key manifestations of ritual healing.