Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Physicality of Wounds - Archeology and Material Culture

1 Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor

2 “And to describe the shapes of the dead”: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence

3 Visible Prowess?: Reading Men’s Head and Face Wounds in Early Medieval Europe to 1000 CE

4 Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c.1403

5 “…Vnnd schüß im vnder dem schwert den ort lang ein zů der brust”: The Placement and Consequences of Sword-blows in Sigmund Ringeck’s Fifteenth-Century Fencing Manual Surgery

6 The Diagnosis and Treatment of Wounds in the Old English Medical Collections: Anglo-Saxon Surgery?

7 Spitting Blood: Medieval Mongol Medical Practices

8 The Wounded Soldier: Honey and Late Medieval Military Medicine

9 “The Depth of Six Inches”: Prince Hal’s Head-Wound at the Battle of Shrewsbury

10 Wounds, Amputations, and Expert Procedures in the City of Valencia in the Early-Fifteenth Century

11 The Mutilation of Derbforgaill

Part 2 The Spirituality of Wounds Stigmata

12 “The Wounded Surgeon”: Devotion, Compassion and Metaphor in Medieval England

13 “Scarce anyone survives a heart wound”: The Wounded Christ in Irish Bardic Religious Poetry

14 Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space

15 Wandering Wounds: The Urban Body in Imitatio Christi Passionate Wounds

16 Ascetic Blood: Ethics, Sufffering and Community in Late-Medieval Culture

17 Christ’s Suppurating Wounds: Leprosy in the Vita of Alice of Schaerbeek (†1250)

18 Wounding the Body and Freeing the Spirit: Dorothea von Montau’s Bloody Quest for Christ, a Late-Medieval Phenomenon of the Extraordinary Kind

19 In the Bursting of an Eye: Blinding and Blindness in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography

Part 3 The Literature of Wounds

20 The Laconic Scar in Early Irish Literature

21 “Into the hede, throw the helme and creste”: Head Wounds and a Question of Kingship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

22 “They … toke their shyldys before them and drew oute their swerdys…”: Inflicting and Healing Wounds in Malory’s Morte Darthur

23 Women’s Wounds in Middle English Romances: An Exploration of Defĳilement, Disfĳigurement, and a Society in Disrepair

Afterword: The Aftermath of Wounds