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Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe (review)

spreading among their patients since the time of Hippocrates. So, the reality of the medical practice and the relationship between doctor and patient influences the imagination of the dreamer in a precise way: in narratives, he sees the god or the saint appear as a real doctor or surgeon and prescribe a treatment after a kind of dialogue. The god or the saint no longer acts at once by means of miraculous power. Similarly, Klaniczay’s chapter deals with Western Christendom, which did not ignore the practices of incubation at all, as proved by hagiographic sources. In the early Middle Ages, however, the miracles of Saint Radegund or Saint Martin give a not insignificant number of examples that show, contrary to the Byzantine practice, the saint is not endowed with the attributes of the physician. Later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (cf. corpus defined by P.-A. Sigal), the cures in dreams occur less within the sanctuary than in the place of residence of the patient. Finally, the investigation shows that, in the thirteenth century—which corresponds to the time of the definitive enforcement of the papal procedure of canonization—a certain number of interesting cases happened in Western Europe as well as in Central Europe. A chapter by Catherine Rider examines the cures offered by the physician Bartholomaeus Carrichter (ca. 1510–67) in his treaty On the Healing of Magical Illnesses to fight against the diseases caused by witches. Finally, Fernando Salmón’s contribution deals with the increasing importance given to the attitude of the doctor toward his patient and his close relations in the scholastic medicine of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As a conclusion, in its voluntarily broad approach, this beautiful volume offers an enriching diversity of cases that, however, allows continuities to be revealed, such as the porosity between medicine and religious and magic practices, the systematic recourse to the divine or supernatural sphere, or still the importance given to the power of the words.