Bulletin of the History of Medicine

The Carolingian era holds a paradoxical place in the history of medieval medicine. On the one hand, modern scholars value the era because the interests of Carolingian healers and the dedication of Carolingian copyists have preserved many ancient and Late Antique medical texts that otherwise would be lost. On the other hand, many of those same scholars still equate Carolingian medicine with Mönchsmedizin (monastic medicine), a term invented in the nineteenth century, and still used even in non-German publications to this day, to define all of early medieval medicine as little more than the rote copying of monks who cared more for the health of their souls than of their bodies. Meg Leja seeks to complicate and improve this limited understanding of Carolingian medicine in Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe.

Embodying the Soul is a sweeping study of health—understood as uniting body and soul—in ninth-century Europe, building on Leja's 2015 Princeton dissertation and a 2016 Viator essay on the same themes. Through a series of thematic chapters, most of which focus on a key Carolingian text or author, Leja argues that medicine and religion must be studied together within Carolingian culture, as they were recast by Carolingian elites as mutually supportive and beneficial aspects of human self improvement. Learned medicine and Christian theology in this era shared a language and conceptual framework of virtue and vice, using the former to heal the latter. The Carolingians hardly invented this idea (the image of Christ the Physician had been popular since Roman times) but the valorization of learned medicine through constructive parallels with Christian belief and practice became, Leja argues, a defining aspect of Carolingian culture. In doing so, Leja sets her monograph in opposition to the longstanding historical concept of Mönchsmedizin, which has limited a more nuanced and appreciative understanding of medical culture in this period.

Carolingian medicine, Leja claims, was more than mere copying of ancient medical texts but became, in the teaching of clerics and intellectuals around the Carolingian court, a valued facet of the Carolingian policy of correctio. Correctio was a defining idea of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, a moral reform program aimed at the restoration (really the new creation) of a unified Christian Roman Empire with a stable and standardized religion, government, and economy visible at the national, local, and personal level. Carolingian correctio was most successful only in the realm of textual "correction," witnessed by the standardization in handwriting and grammar under imperial patronage, and the more abundant and [End Page 462] proficient copying of religious and secular texts from Roman and Late Antique culture. This copying and correction of texts also included a significant number of medical texts written in the third through seventh centuries, which Carolingian healers (usually in monasteries) incorporated into large medical compendia. Leja closely examines the production, contents, and social and religious contexts of dozens of these compendia (58 manuscripts are listed in the bibliography), most notably the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (ca. 800 CE), the best-known medical manuscript from Europe in this era. Numerous scholars have studied this medical collection and its enigmatic prologue, but none have provided such thorough contextualization in Carolingian culture and comparison to contemporary medical and religious manuscripts.

Leja organizes the book in three parts, with a total of seven chapters, moving outward from the soul to society. In Part I, "An Ever Closer Union," Leja uses the metaphor of marriage to guide her discussion of Carolingian ideas about the soul, the self, and the body (with one chapter on each topic). These discussions are based primarily on the writings of Carolingian authors on moral, ethical, and religious topics, most notably Alcuin of York, Jonas of Orléans, Hrabanus Maurus, and Dhuoda. These three chapters serve in a way as a lengthy prologue to the core of the book, Part II, "Medicine for the Body and Soul," in which she explores the role of medicine and medici within Carolingian Christian society. The two chapters of Part II are the strongest in the book (and of greatest interest to historians of medicine) as they are based on Leja's previous publications and are founded on the most thorough research into the original manuscripts. She demonstrates convincingly in Part II that Carolingian elites redefined medicine as both necessary and good and redefined the medicus as a devoted Christian servant, engaged in a worthy ministerium for the body alongside the priest serving the soul. In the third and final part, "Medical Order and Disorder for Self and Society," Leja explores how this new Carolingian model of Christian healing played out in society (or at least monastic society). Her two key examples of this new model of healing are prognostication and dietary regimens, both of which topics feature prominently in Carolingian medical collections. These medical techniques, Leja argues, were validated by sharing language and cosmological frameworks with their religious equivalents, namely, the computus and moral prescriptions against overeating.

Leja is most convincing when she traces the shifting and overlapping meanings of key terms and ideas that are shared by medical and religious/moral texts, such as notions of moderation, temperance, balance, and "necessity" (necessitas). In the Carolingian period, priests became more like doctors and doctors more like priests as they shared a similar framework for judging bodily and spiritual health. Leja goes too far, perhaps, in wanting to see direct connections between changes in Carolingian medical manuscripts and all of the more sweeping cultural imperatives of Carolingian correctio. Carolingianists and medical historians should investigate whether the Christian apologia of the Lorscher Arzneibuch, which is central to many of her arguments, is really as representative of Carolingian ideas as Leja would have us believe. Nonetheless, these doubts only highlight the richness of her arguments and the challenges she has made to traditional and overly [End Page 463] simplistic portrayals of Carolingian medicine. Her book will surely encourage debate for decades to come about Carolingian culture and the intersections of medicine and religion in the Middle Ages.