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William Holme, medicus 93
transcribe remedies from the esaurus Pauperum, but independently, often
diering in the length of citation, or which ingredients are included.
One heading gives a clear idea of the scope of De simplicibus medicine. e
entry for Matrix is really, of course, an entry for a site of illness, rather than for
a medical complaint. e illness treated most often here is suocacio matricis
(suocation of the womb). But there are others, including precipitatio matricis
(prolapse of the womb), mola matricis (a monstrous growth in the womb) or
ventositatio matricis (atulence of the womb). A woman may also be treated
for pain in the womb, or hardness of the womb, ux from the womb or a
surfeit of wet humours in the womb. Holme does not identify these as subheadings but subsumes all under one heading: Matrix. Holme includes 212
sub-headings for medicinal simples in one alphabetical series for this variety
of dierent womb complaints. ey run from Abrotanum to Zurumbet. Most
of these are identiable, as they are found in other common lists of medicinal
simples like the Alphita, Sinonima Bartholomei, the De proprietatibus rerum
of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and appear in a modern compilation like Tony
Hunt’s Plant Names of Medieval England.48 Some resist easy identication,
usually because Holme relies on the latinised text of Avicenna’s Canon,
where Arabic names are sometimes just transliterated (as with Zurumbet). It
is unlikely in such cases that Holme or his readers knew what these terms
meant. Most simples are plants, but there are also animal parts, gums and
resins, spices, minerals and human excretions like woman’s milk or child’s
urine. Holme seldom gives exact quantities for the simples to be used in the
remedies of De simplicis medicinis (Petrus Hispanus is responsible for those
that do appear); but he usually reveals how to administer them. A typical entry
is that for Ysopus (hyssop):
Hyssop is good for hardness and coldness in the womb and a poultice
made from hyssop boiled in water wipes away and cleans the womb of cold
superuities. Platearius.
49
Hyssop was not a native English plant, so not the product of an herb garden.
It was obtainable only because an apothecary took part in international trade.
48
Alphita, ed. A. García González (Florence, 2008); Sinonoma Bartholomei: A Glossary
from a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript in the Library of Pembroke College, Oxford, ed.
J. L. G. Mowat (Oxford, 1882); Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum,
6: Liber XVII, ed. I. Ventura (Turnhout, 2007); T. Hunt, Plant Names of Medieval
England (Cambridge, 1989).
49
Peterhouse MS 168, fol. 145v: Ysopus valet ad duriciem & frigiditatem in matrice
& fomentum factum ex aqua decoccionis eius matricem a superuitatibus frigidis
mundicat & abstergit platearius.
94 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Questions of supply or diculties in identication of medicinal simples do not
play any part in Holme’s work. In this respect, he diers from his contemporary,
the Dominican Henry Daniel, whose Herbal reects not just on the use of
plant simples but their appearance and where they may be found.50 ere is no
explanation of how or where the hyssop plaster should be applied. Nor does
De simplicibus medicinis feature the illustrative case histories characteristic
of the Tabula medicine. Holme limits its scope thereby, even though the text
prescribes a vast number of dierent uses for medicinal simples in treating the
specied complaints.
Conclusion: practising and preaching
It is hard to judge how many other Franciscans practised medicine like William
Holme (a few candidates appeared in Chapter 1). anks to the Tabula
medicine, we do know the names at least of some other contemporaries.51
Some at least healed patients outside the Order. Confessors to royal and noble
clients were very well placed to advise on the health of the body as well as
that of the soul, though the seal of the confessional limits our knowledge
of what passed between confessor and penitent. As we saw in Chapter 1,
Holme’s contemporary, the Dominican Georey Launde, was both confessor
and physician to the duke of York.52 e kind of service to the poor and the
sick so crucial to St Francis’s conception of the mendicant vocation would
have encouraged medical service to the lower orders of society (as supposed
by Parkinson discussing Holme in his Collectanea Anglo-minoritica).53 e fact
that so many friaries were situated in towns and cities rather than in monastic
seclusion meant that friars found themselves dispensing medical advice and
remedies as well as preaching to and hearing the confessions of citizens living
outside their walls. Holme’s writings suggest also that he treated people who
could not aord expensive medicines, not least brethren in his own Order.
Holme charged his wealthy patients a fat fee but treated poor people for free;
secular physicians and surgeons claimed to do the same. We know that William
Holme asked 100 shillings for the ointment for the knight Punchardon: such
50
See http://henrydaniel.utoronto.ca/herbal/, accessed 17 April 2023. A direct com-
parison of Daniel and Holme is made in Jones, ‘Henry Daniel’, pp. 75–8.
51
Robert Winstanton, William Appulton, John Castell, Peter Russell and Robert
Wainete are mentioned by name (see Jones, ‘Mediating’, p. 299).
52
See P. N. R. Zutshi and R. Ombres, ‘e Dominicans in Cambridge, 1238–1538’,
Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 60 (1990), 313–73 (p. 328); Emden, BRUC, p.
355; Montford, Health, Sickness, p. 126; Jones, ‘Mediating’, pp. 284–5.
53
See note 5 above.
William Holme, medicus 95
high charges may not have been uncommon. William Holme treated women
and treated them for women’s illnesses too.
e kind of medicine Holme practised was at once conventional and
eclectic. His authorities were the classical authors, Hippocrates and Galen,
supplemented by Islamicate translators and interpreters, and the Latin
scholastics who, in turn, commented on these. His approach to diagnosis,
regimen and therapy is broadly in line with that found in the works of his
contemporary, John Mireld, a chaplain to St Bartholomew’s hospital and
author of the encyclopedic handbook, the Breviarium Bartholomei (a source
for the Tabula medicine). Holme included surgery in his practice, and he
certainly experimented on himself with the use of the heated cautery iron. We
do not know if he carried out manual surgery on others. Like other English
friars, he was attracted to the art of distilling remedies. e purity achieved by
distillation made them extraordinarily powerful means to combat illnesses that
resisted ordinary cures. Although Holme is not known to recommend the use
of the quintessence championed by his fellow Franciscan, John of Rupescissa,
he was an enthusiast for the manifold virtues of articial balsam. Holme was
ready for the challenge of pestilence, using exotic and expensive remedies like
his ‘imperial powder’. e urban location of most Franciscan houses meant
that friars were very much exposed when epidemics struck – and it seems that
Holme was in the front line.
54
As an author or compiler, William Holme is known for two very dierent
works. One is the Tractatus de medicinis, which begins as if it were the draft of
a medical Practica in head-to-toe order of illnesses. As it tails away, this text
seems not to be a nished work, but more like a series of obiter dicta recorded
by the Franciscan scribe, John Holbeche. Perhaps it was originally intended to
serve as a guide to medical therapy for friaries. ere are no case histories in
the text, but there are indications that Holme tried some of the remedies on
himself. e De simplicibus medicinis is very dierent: a laboriously constructed
work excerpting twelve named authorities on medicinal simples, designed to
show what is recommended for use against specic diseases. e organisation
54
See the frequent mention of urban environments in the surviving sources for epi-
demic disease in the reign of Henry VII, in L. E. Voigts and A. Payne, ‘Medicine
for a Great Household (ca. 1500): Berkeley Castle Muniments Select Book 89’, in
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3rd s., 12, ed. C. Kosso and A. M. Scott
(New York, 2016), pp. 87–270 (pp. 183–9); A. Gransden, ‘A Fourteenth-Century
Chronicle from the Grey Friars at Lynn’, EHR 72 (1957), 270–8, describes an
outbreak of pestilencia in the Franciscan custody of Cambridge, lasting the whole
summer of 1349 (p. 274); contemporary strategies to improve urban environments
are described by C. Rawclie, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval
English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge, 2013).
96 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
of De simplicibus medicinis is akin to that of the aids to preaching for which
the mendicant orders were famous. Two manuscripts of the work known to
survive were associated with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; like
the other Franciscan compilation, the Tabula medicine, the fate of Holme’s
text was to nd a readership among academic physicians. Because we know so
little about mendicant libraries in England, it is hard to tell if these works were
equally successful in nding readers in the friaries.
In the end, there is not much to connect William Holme the practitioner
with William Holme the author or compiler. e writings do not reect on
the practice, and the practice does not reveal the author. If it were not for the
overwhelming likelihood that the two Franciscan William Holmes ourishing
in 1415 were one and the same, they could not readily be matched up. omas
Fayreford, on the other hand, based his compilation on the requirements of
his medical practice. Some of the patients listed by Fayreford at the beginning
of the text reappear to bear witness to the eectiveness of the treatments he
described. e two writings of William Holme are very dierent from each
other, as well as from Fayreford. e De simplicibus medicinis is a scholastic
tool, a wide-ranging and erudite compilation designed to make searching for
specic items easier in a wealth of information about useful medical simples.
e Tractatus de medicinis is an unnished collection of remedies probably
dictated to a scribe and meant for use in a Franciscan house. Holme’s works
are good indicators of the wide range of mendicant writing on medicine.
3
Writing Medicine Dierently
n the last chapter, we looked at the writings, authored or compiled,
I
associated with the Franciscan William Holme. is chapter will pursue
further questions about the kinds of medical writing in England. It will be
about form rather than content in medicine, and I will leave questions about
striking features in the content of friars’ medical writing until Chapter 4. I
will argue in this chapter that friars’ writings on medicine diered in some
important respects from those which emerged from university medical
teaching. Part of the dierence is accounted for by the slow and hesitant
process of the emergence of teaching of medicine at the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge. No texts are known to survive from the thirteenth century
testifying to English masters teaching medicine at the English universities.
No English-educated physician is known from the thirteenth century, and
there was no degree-awarding faculty of medicine before the fourteenth.
An absence of English contributions to the scholastic literature of medicine
before the fourteenth century, and its stuttering development in later centuries,
meant that the contributions of the friars to medical writing lled a gap which
in countries like Italy and France was not so evident.
is is not to say that circulation and knowledge of medical texts was
behindhand in England. English monastic houses acquired the texts
associated with the label Salernitan medicine early, compared to most of their
continental counterparts: Monica Green talks of Salerno on the ames,
using this phrase to capture the rapid transmission of medical texts from the
southern Italian lands controlled by the Normans to their relations in postconquest England.2 English monastic houses were keen to acquire these texts,
1
1
F. M. Getz,‘e Faculty of Medicine before 1500’, in e History of the University of
Oxford: Volume II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford,
1992), pp. 373–405; D. R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, Volume
1, e University to 1446 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 202–10.
2
M. H. Green, ‘Salerno on the ames: e Genesis of Anglo-Norman Medical
Literature’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: e French of England, c.
1100–c. 1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), pp. 220–32. Green draws
attention to the library of Rochester Cathedral as an example of English monastic
98 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
as lists of their libraries show. Texts dealing with materia medica (antidotaries,
herbals) and those dealing with diagnostics and therapeutics (Practica texts)
were particularly in demand.3 e friars in England were pioneers in the
construction of lists of books held in monasteries of all the religious orders, and
they were keen to put medical and natural philosophical books to use in the
study of the Bible and patristics. It is no surprise that the Salernitan medical
texts to be found in monastic libraries were also reected in compilations on
medicine by friars. A good example are the sources used by Henry Daniel in
his Liber uricrisiarum. Daniel must have had excellent access to a wide range of
Salernitan texts on uroscopy and other medical topics but was unlikely to have
owned these personally.4 Similarly precocious, the Aristotelian libri naturales
in Latin translation circulated in England in the twelfth century. Aristotle,
Galen and their Arabic commentators were evidently studied in the nascent
Arts faculty at Oxford at this time. John Blund had studied in Paris before
lecturing on the arts in Oxford. Blund wrote his Tractatus de anima, showing
close study of both Aristotle and Avicenna (who wrote treatises with the same
title). Alfred of Sareshel wrote his treatise De motu cordis after studying in
Toledo and translating Aristotelian texts on minerals and on plants into Latin.
He too possibly taught at Oxford in the Arts faculty. His treatise shows a wide
knowledge of Aristotelian and Arabic works on natural philosophy, and he
commented on many other Aristotelian texts (though these are now lost).
5
Alfred’s commentaries are cited in the extensive gloss to Aristotle’s libri
naturales, which emerged in England in the second half of the thirteenth
century. is ‘Oxford’ or ‘English’ gloss, as Roger French called it, is found in
manuscripts of English origin. As well as mentioning Alfred, the gloss refers
to many Salernitan medical texts. A particular object of attention is the Isagoge
of Johannitius, which was to become eventually the primary introductory text
to the teaching of medicine at English universities, as elsewhere. But it is rst
discussed from a natural philosophical point of view in the ‘Oxford’ gloss to
Aristotle’s work, in other words, as a means of teaching arts at Oxford. It is
understood in the gloss that there is a body of medical knowledge which may
be studied or taught as a scientia, but that it is subalternated to the principles
holdings of Salernitan texts (English Benedictine Libraries: e Shorter Catalogues,
ed. R. Sharpe et al., CMBLC 4 (London,1996), pp. 523–5).
3
Getz, ‘Faculty’, pp. 374–6.
4
Daniel, Liber uricrisiarum, pp. 8–12; https://henrydaniel.utoronto.ca/urines/sourc-
es/, accessed 17 April 2023; F. Wallis, ‘Latin Traditions of Uroscopy’, in Henry
Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing, ed. S. Star (Toronto, 2022),
pp. 17–37.
5
Getz, ‘Faculty’, p. 375, for Blund and Sareshel.
Writing Medicine Differently 99
of natural philosophy, so that the medicus begins where the natural philosopher
leaves o.6 In England, the study of medicine at the universities does not begin
until the fourteenth century, and even thereafter occurs only sporadically.
Before John Gaddesden and his Rosa anglica (c. 1313), comment on medical
texts was restricted to the natural philosophers of the Faculty of Arts.
Anti-scholastic writing and Roger Bacon’s programme
ere were also forces working to establish a distance between the friars and
university medicine. A mendicant vocation was not easily reconciled with the
pursuit of medicine as a means of making money. Charity towards brethren
in the mendicant orders and towards those to whom the friars preached and
confessed urged friars to employ their healing skills without charge. e example
of St Francis in his mission to lepers would have resonated with the Franciscans
in particular.7 We have seen, nevertheless, in Chapter 1 that a small number of
friars professed after having been trained in the universities in medicine. While
the orders of friars were keen to establish themselves within the university
faculties of theology from an early stage, they were hostile to friars entering the
universities to study arts or medicine. To judge from their own rules, those in
authority over Dominicans and Franciscans saw medical studies at university
level as, at best, an unwelcome distraction from the friars’ mission of teaching,
preaching and confession, and, at worst, as an abuse of God-given healing powers,
insofar as it led to proting as a medical practitioner.8 e educational system
of friars allowed for the teaching of arts as a preparation for the higher study of
theology at certain designated houses in a group, but did not make provision for
medical education. e friars who gravitated to Oxford and Cambridge in the
thirteenth century were not there to pursue the curriculum in Arts, but to learn
theology – and soon they came to teach it.
6
R. K. French, ‘Teaching Aristotle in the Medieval English Universities: De Plantis
and the Physical Glossa Ordinaria’, Physis 34 (1997), 226–96; ‘ubi desinit phisicus
incipit medicus’ was ubiquitously attributed to Aristotle.
7
D. Trembinski, Illness and Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of
Assisi (Toronto, 2020); Montford, Health, Sickness, pp. 34–40; Ziegler, Medicine and
Religion, pp. 114–16, on caritas and medicine; M. F. Cusato, ‘Mercy Evanescent:
omas of Celano’s Rewrite of the Encounter of Francis with the Leper (2 Celano
9)’, in Ordo et sanctitas: e Franciscan Spiritual Journey in eology and Hagiography:
A Festschrift in Honor of J. A. Wayne Hellmann, ed. M. F. Cusato et al. (Boston, 2017),
pp. 66–89. Observant Franciscans in fteenth-century Italy pictured their founder
saint as a medical practitioner: see D. B. Presciutti, ‘e Friar as Medico’, in Repre-
senting Inrmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, ed. by J. Henderson, F. Jacobs
and J. K. Nelson (Abingdon, 2021), pp. 93–116.
8
Montford, Health, Sickness, pp. 107–13.
100 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
However, the rst lector in the Franciscan studium in Oxford from 1229 to
1235 was Robert Grosseteste, and he had already established a reputation as
an interpreter of some of the libri naturales and even as knowledgeable about
medicine (according to Gerald of Wales).9 Roger Bacon, who did not become a
friar probably until 1257, had studied and probably lectured on Arts in Oxford,
and then lectured at Paris, where he was a pioneer in teaching Aristotle’s natural
philosophy. He returned to Oxford around 1247, and, though Grosseteste was by
then bishop of Lincoln, Bacon came to know Grosseteste’s students among the
Franciscans, Adam Marsh and omas of Wales (who succeeded Grosseteste
as lector).10 Bacon’s perspective on medicine was that of a natural philosopher,
but he did not hesitate to go beyond the bounds of the commentators and
authors of the ‘Oxford’ gloss and grapple with problems in practical medicine.
Soon after Roger Bacon took the habit of a Franciscan in 1257, he wrote De
erroribus medicorum, in which he attacked the teachers of medicine in Paris
(there would have been none such in Oxford at this time). He claims that they
had for some twenty years past preferred the disputation of endless questions
and useless arguments to the testimony of experience in educating students of
medicine in therapeutics. ey had, as a consequence, neglected the vital eld of
pharmacology. is meant they failed to instruct their pupils in the necessity of
fermentation in the preparation of drugs; they did not teach how to compound
medicines; nor how to remove poisonous material from medicines; and they did
not teach the theory of dosage when medicines were given to patients.11 What
was more, these same medici had failed to instil in their pupils the rudiments of
the sciences of astrology, alchemy, mathematics and agriculture, all of which were
vital to the successful administration of medicines. As Faye Getz has argued,
Bacon deplored the educational project of scholastic medicine and wanted to
substitute informed teaching of the liberal arts.
12
9
R. W. Southern, ‘Grosseteste, Robert (c. 1170–1253), Scientist, eologian, and
Bishop of Lincoln’, ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://
doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11665; R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: e Growth of
an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), p. 65; see also the
frequent medical references in Robert Grosseteste: Templum Dei, ed. J. Goering and
F. A. C. Mantello (Toronto, 1984).
10
G. Molland, ‘Bacon [Bakun], Roger (c. 1214–1292?), philosopher and Franciscan
friar’, ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/1008.
11
M. S. Allen, Roger Bacon and the Incorruptible Human, 1220–1292: Alchemy, Phar-
macology and the Desire to Prolong Life (Basingstoke, 2022), pp. 40–8. Allen’s book
provides an authoritative account of Bacon’s alchemical project.
12
e text is edited in Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, ed. R. Steele, 16 vols. (Ox-
ford, 1909–40), IX, pp. 150–71; Getz, Medicine, p. 59; F. M. Getz, ‘Roger Bacon and
Writing Medicine Differently 101
Fig. . Roger Bacon OFM, imagined as author of De retardatione accidentium senectutis, Italy,
c. . Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley , fol. r. His pose is melancholic, appropriate
to old age.
is wide-ranging assault on what Bacon identied as the failures of
medical education in the university setting is today only known through
the survival of the text of De erroribus medicorum in manuscripts written
in England.13 Such an assault was perhaps easier to launch in a country
Medicine: e Paradox of the Forbidden Fruit and the Secrets of Long Life’, in
Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed J. Hackett (Leiden, 1997), pp.
337–64. I follow here the pioneering research on English Baconianism by Faye Getz.
13
M. Pereira, ‘Come e perché sbagliano i medici? La critica di Ruggero Bacone nel De
erroribus medicorum’, in La medicina nel basso medioevo. Tradizioni e conitti. Atti del
102 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
where the university medical faculties were weaker than on the continent.
In itself a polemic was a new form of medical writing. e programmatic
element in Roger Bacon’s writing was built on a vision of the friars’ role as
a sort of independent think-tank for the papacy as it faced the challenge
of the advance of the Mongols, the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
(Tartars and Saracens as Bacon called these external threats), and the internal
corruption of the church itself. is Baconian programme proved to be timelimited (Pope Clement IV died in 1268 before he could consider Bacon’s
proposals). By the end of the thirteenth century, the papacy found itself
dealing with a new set of challenges, not least those posed by divisions within
the Franciscan order itself.14 But, as we shall see in the next chapter, Roger
Bacon’s ideas about medicine, astrology and alchemy did not disappear, but
continued to circulate, and underwent a fteenth-century revival in England,
shorn of the original programmatic element.
15
Roger Bacon’s formal innovations did not end there. One paragraph of De
erroribus medicorum is elaborated into an entire book (VI) of the Opus maius,
compiled by Bacon in 1267–8, at the request of Pope Clement IV. is work
was framed as an analysis of the perils facing Latin Christendom and outlined
a programme of reform to turn Latin weakness into strength. In the Opus
maius, Bacon set out the ways in which the teaching of languages, mathematics,
optics, and of scientia experimentalis (which harnessed experiential knowledge
in a variety of sciences, including astrology, perspectiva and alchemy) could be
deployed by the papacy to provide protection and new weapons in the struggle
against external and internal enemies. To his dismay the learning of the
universities did not address the decit in languages and science which Bacon
sought to remedy.16 e universities were obsessed with a scholastic method
LV Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 14–16 ottobre 2018, ed. F. Santi, T. Grego-
ry, and E. Paoli (Spoleto, 2019), pp. 407–40 (p. 407, n.1): Pereira sees this work as
an external critique of medical education from the perspective of the eectiveness
of pharmacology; see also https://rogeriusbacon.wordpress.com/accessus-ad-man-
uscripta/, s.n. Tractatus de erroribus medicorum, accessed 17 April 2023. e manu-
script tradition of De erroribus is entirely English. A modern English translation is
in M. C. Welborn, ‘e Errors of the Doctors according to Friar Roger Bacon of
the Minor Order’, Isis 18 (1932), 26–62.
14
A. Power, Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom (Cambridge, 2013).
15
F. M. Getz, ‘To Prolong Life and Promote Health: Baconian Alchemy and Phar-
macy in the English Learned Tradition’, in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval
Culture, ed. S. Campbell, B. Hall and D. Klausner (New York, 1992), pp. 141–51.
16
A particular interest in learning Hebrew, for missionary or controversial purpos-
es, was characteristic of Dominican language schools, and of Robert Grosseteste,
Roger Bacon, Adam Marsh and other English Franciscans. See D. C. Klepper, e