The Trinity–Worth Lecture Series in Medieval & Renaissance Medicine and Science

The Medieval History Research Centre and the Edward Worth Library's annual Trinity–Worth Lecture for 2024 is Peter Murray Jones of the University of Cambridge. His paper, to be delivered on Thursday 10 April at 4.15pm in The Medieval History Research Centre seminar room, is entitled ‘Friars and Healing in Fifteenth-Century York’.

Our knowledge of the healthscape of late medieval York is fuller than that for any other English city (London included). The surviving civic, ecclesiastical and legal records in York and the bonus of the extraordinary and beautiful Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York held in the British Library have given us rich insights into the provision of medical services to the city and its rural hinterland. The development of written documentation in these records went hand in hand with the emergence of a distinctive and self-conscious civic community. York was England's second city, the capital of the North, and the seat of an archbishop. But it had been traumatised by the first and second waves of bubonic plague in 1349 and 1361 and the decline of York's role in international textile trade meant that the city's population was significantly smaller for the next four hundred years than at its peak size c.1300. Pestilence and food shortages continued to overshadow the city in the fifteenth century. The role of secular healers in meeting the health needs of the reduced population is charted in the Guild Book and in the civic records; the impressive Hospital of St Leonard was a significant channel for civic charity. But one important dimension of health care is missing from these sources. The four orders of friars (Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Augustinians) each had building complexes in fifteenth-century York and although these buildings disappeared completely in the 1530s the friars left behind valuable testimony for their interest in medicine and role in civic health care. This testimony is to be found in records of medical books and in surviving manuscripts owned or compiled by friars.

This lecture will explore this manuscript evidence for friars' medicine in fifteenth century York. One important source is to be found in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 359, which contains the catalogue of the Augustinian friars of York, the only such to survive from any mendicant house in England. Practical medical books make up an astonishing proportion of the Augustinians' library. Two Franciscans belonging to the York custody owned and compiled their own medical manuscripts which have come down to us. In 2024 the Curious Cures project at Cambridge University Library brought to light another medical remedy-book most likely put together for the York Dominican convent. This manuscript testifies directly to the healing practice of two of the leading York Dominican friars of the mid-fifteenth century and to their attempts to treat pestilence. Analysis of the remedies in this manuscript reveals significant details about the kind of medicine they practised. Taken together these sources of evidence for the friars throw unexpected light on the 'missing' healers of late medieval York.

Former TCD-Worth Lecturers