Turns out, folks in the so-called “Dark Ages” were more sophisticated than we’ve given them credit for. A new international research project, featuring scholars from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has uncovered how people in the early Middle Ages were keen observers of health and the natural world.
Meg Leja, who helped lead the effort, said, “People were engaging with medicine on a much broader scale than had previously been thought.” She and the team worked on the Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM), a freshly launched catalog made possible by the British Academy. The project gathered hundreds of early medieval manuscripts, nearly doubling the number of known medical texts from that era.
Search Antibodies Search Now Use our Antibody Search Tool to find the right antibody for your research. Filter
by Type, Application, Reactivity, Host, Clonality, Conjugate/Tag, and Isotype.
Among the remedies they found? Headache relief made from crushed peach pits mixed with rose oil, and even lizard-based treatments for better hair. As Leja pointed out, “A lot of things that you see in these manuscripts are actually being promoted online currently as alternative medicine, but they have been around for thousands of years.” Interestingly, many of these health notes were scribbled in the margins of unrelated texts—like grammar or theology books.
“It's true that we do lack a lot of sources for the period. In that sense, it is ‘dark.’ But not in terms of any kind of ‘anti-science’ attitudes—people in the early Middle Ages were quite into science, into observation, into figuring out the utility of different natural substances, and trying to identify patterns and make predictions,” added Leja.
The research team will continue to update the catalog with new manuscripts and are working on new editions and translations of medical texts that could be used in teaching. Leja noted that while previously catalogs focused on texts from well-known authorities like Hippocrates, this isn’t necessarily material that people in the Dark Ages would have prioritized, and a more comprehensive catalog will allow historians to show medicine in its fullness.