Gone Medieval - Lizard Shampoo, Potions & Remedies

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Can vultures eyes wrapped in fox pelt help heal sore skin? How important are leeches? Medieval people cared deeply about beauty, health and wellness; they were obsessed with remedies, beauty hacks and astrological predictions. Dr. Eleanor Janega hears about fascinating new research led by Professor James Palmer, from global ingredients and moon-based health charts, to how to achieve a medieval 'glow up'.More:Midwinter Medieval TraditionsMedieval Guide to MagicGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producers are Rob Weinberg and Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delved into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. If we were to believe the way that popular culture has depicted life in the Middle Ages, we might think that there were basically two types of people. You got filthy villagers in torn, brown sack-like clothes. They have matted hair, rotten teeth, and sunken eyes, and then there's nobles. They're only marginally cleaner. and they're brooding in candelot castles with grim expressions in velvet cloaks.

But either way, everyone is ghostly pale or dirt smeared with blemishes and pox scars or plague bugos. I mean, weren't they? Thankfully now, we know that medieval people were not averse to a little bit of a glow-up. And they were just as concerned with beauty, health, and seasonal wellness as today's average TikToker. I mean, hell, some of those influencer monks actually wrote down. a recipe for lizard shampoo, which I cannot wait to find out more about. Today we are diving headfirst into the margins of dusty manuscripts with Professor James Palmer from the University of St. Andrews, and what he and his team have uncovered has absolutely

blown my mind. Thanks to their groundbreaking new research and the combined efforts of scholars from St. Andrews, Utrecht, Oslo, Binghampton, and Fordham, more than twice as many early medieval medical texts have been identified than we previously knew about. And these aren't just clinical how-toes tucked away in apothecary handbooks. They are scrawled in the margins of theology, grammar, and science books. And it shows us a world obsessed with remedies, prognostics, beauty hacks, and astrological predictions for everything from childbirth to the likelihood of surviving a fever on a critical Monday. From spices that crossed continents to prayers that doubled as prescriptions, from charm spells and moon-based health charts to the amazing fact that medieval Europeans used ingredients from Sri Lanka and Indonesia to mix up their potions.

We're going to find out more about a rich, bizarre, and surprisingly scientific health culture. So pour yourself a calming herbal infusion and prepare to learn about how medieval medicine was weirder, wilder, and way more global than you ever imagined. James, welcome back to Gone Medieval. Thanks for having me. we'll never stop dragging you on here, but I'm definitely not going to stop dragging you on here when you've got such an incredible project as this one that you have just got the findings from. So can you tell us a little bit about the project in general? It was it surprising to you to find that there are more than double the number of manuscripts that have medical information from the first millennium? I mean, that just seems huge to me. It was amazing. So, The last time anybody had attempted to do a catalogue of how much material we know from the early Middle Ages about medicine. It was the 1950s, early 1960s. One of the two guys was only interested in what could be found in France.

Now, here we are a long time later and we're looking further afield. You know, some of it we've been to Poland. We've been to America. We're looking all over the place. And we're just acquiring more and more and more. and the things that we can access on the internet that we couldn't access before to make it a lot easier. You don't have to go and hunt things down in monasteries if they have got their manuscripts digitized online. It's not cheating.

It's just easier. I don't know. I'm sorry, you're never going to convince me that I don't want to hunt things down in monasteries. It's taking away some of them. We do also go and hunt things down in monastery. So, yeah, well, you set off, and you don't know what you're going to find. And so there's a few people on this team. We've all individually been out and about in the libraries around the world looking at things, picking up little notes on things, and then just comparing things. And we go, well, I've got all these things that people have never found. Oh, I've got all these things. And we start to build it up into a project where, well, let's just list what we've got. And suddenly, you know, it becomes tens of things, 20, 30, 50, 50, 100. And we ended up with 198 manuscripts from the early Middle Ages that have not part of previous catalogs that have made.

medicine materials in them. It's amazing. That is just wild to me and also incredibly exciting because I think some of my first loves were specifically medical manuscripts. I love how scruffy they are. I love how people are constantly trying to exchange this information. And one of the things I found really incredible about your study is that these medical things are showing up in all kinds of places that we wouldn't expect them. You know, it's not necessarily, oh, here's a big manuscript full of medical information. They're showing up in some random places, no? Yeah, it's brilliant. And this is partly why those guys who were very good scholars and didn't really pick up on a lot of this material before, because they'd gone for the big deluxe.

Here is a 500-page tome on medicine, and it has Hippocrates at the top, and it has Galen at the top, and they know where they are, and they know where they're happy. Well, we've done things like fine medical recipes in the margins of calendars, tucked away. between a couple of saintly biographies. Back in the margins of a book on astronomy, at one point, one of our favorite finds was some annotations and says for some Virgil, and there's a reference to a herb in passing in St. Virgil,

and someone's drawn a little herb and added some little recipes about what you can do with the herbs. So these are the kind of little accidental finds, which people aren't, catalogers aren't out there looking for. And it takes sometimes a lot of specialist knowledge to know what's even, going on. So when you get that coincidence, there are only so many people who know so much about early medieval medicine. So then we're out in our archives playing around. It's a great type of

look what we have. Yeah, so it appears all over the place. And so part of the fun of this is just seeing, not just that it appears in different kinds of books than we're expecting, but then this kind of leads on to, what does this show us about how people are thinking about medicine as a whole? because then it's not just, here is this very learned science that we are thinking very carefully and deeply about. Because if you've got little annotations and things, sometimes there's just monks go, I've got a bit of toothache, and so I'm going to accumulate all the things I can find on toothache. So it's got an accidental everyday medicine as well. Some of it's just like, here's some funky stuff that I found in a manuscript.

Sometimes you can chart where they move about. And so it's exciting, when it's clear that some people are just traveling about and they'll go somewhere and they find something. They're just added down with whatever book they have to hand. And so it tells us a lot more, as you said, it's about the little connections. I think, it's the dark ages. People did not move about. They never left their village. And they didn't know anything.

And then what we actually have here is this super international, bright collection of networks and exciting. And people are buzzing about and they're swapping ideas and they're swapping. recipes. And some of these things, you'll get the, okay, so I mentioned the toothache. You'll get these things where you don't just get a recipe for toothache. They will have gone out and they'll have got 20 recipes on toothache. But together, again, they are hunting people down there. Excuse me, have you got anything on toothache? We're building up these big reservoirs and stuff. So, early middle ages, it's the dark ages. People are stupid. Well, so they don't have many books about, but they are desperately trying to find stuff out. And I love that. It's very easy to write

it offers a time of ignorance and superstition. But these people are, we haven't got any books, but we're really super curious. What can we find? Well, do you think that this is why these recipes were missed in the first place? I mean, obviously, it's easy to miss things if, and I guess, with all due respect to the researchers who came before us, you know, in the 50s and 60s, I guess if no one has written down, oh, there's a big old book of Hippocrat. here, then that counts as like finding something and you're like, good enough? Or do you think that there's a kind of, I don't know, snobbery, even among people who like the earlier Middle Ages that doesn't encourage people to go looking for these things?

There's a huge snobbery about early medieval medicine. And this kind of goes in two little strands. And the first strand is historians of medicine. The medicine isn't as technically as exciting and as good as later periods. And sometimes even earlier periods, does it compare to Greek medicine? Not very well. It's bad medicine. That's true. There's just not very much you can do about that.

Now, within that, there is a thing where, if you go back into the ancient world, most medicine was in Greek. Now, what I'm looking at is really Latin medicine. And so there was never a big learned culture of Latin medicine. if you were any good, you went to Constantinople or Alexandria or somewhere, and you learned it in Greek. We actually have books by very learned, sophisticated physicians. But they're Latin books, and their Latin books start. Well, I wrote my sophisticated book in Greek.

And here's the digest for people who can't cope with that kind of stuff. So, like, Latin medicine was almost by definition. Medicine for people who struggled with languages and therefore maybe weren't as mentally antichael. So it's like medicine for dumaises. it? Medicine for dummies. So, but then, so the scholars are looking at this going, why is all this Latin medicine so rubbish?

But it's because it was for the medicine for dummies. And that what then the modern scholars looking at this didn't really have a lot of time for was the fact that this was a bilingual culture. And they were kind of very much, well, it's the Greek medicine, which is good. And the Latin medicine, which is not as good. I guess that's a really interesting point, though, because I think that there is also something that happens here with snobbery. So if you don't know the Latin word, you say, oh, well, this is bad Latin.

This is something silly that I don't know. But actually, it is fairly sophisticated if you're bringing it over from the Greek. And, you know, Lord knows I don't have Greek. So, you know, I'm not here. I'm the dummy they're talking about, right? So, I mean, we're definitely seeing also this level of information that's coming in from pre-Christian sources, you know, from the Greek sources. You know, these things that are really reified. I always find the stobbery around medicine interesting as well because if Hippocrates is doing it, everyone's like, wow, that's real stuff. But then if medieval people are still doing it, they're like idiots, why aren't you better than Hippocrates find out? You know, but surely we have like certain information that's coming from the older world. And I mean, do we see that changing at all when it's coming in through sources via like monks who are Christian or, you know, do we see a differentiation in terms of it coming through?

from Islamic sources at the time? Yeah, a little bit. So, I mean, your first point is, Hippocrates does it, and it's clever, and then people are doing it hundreds of years later, why are they so stupid? Medicine, as a science, you expect there to be progress. And this is the kind of the dangerous word. Nobody at the time is thinking about, how do we do progress? That's not a conversation anyone's having.

Now, they would like more an effective medicine, definitely. but they're not thinking about it in terms of progress. So they are delighted to have some Hippocrates, and they're delighted to have some gala. Now, the problem with, when you've got authorities, authorities are great. And even like St. Augustine, the great church writer of the 5th century working in North Africa,

he says, everybody loves Hippocrates so much that people started writing texts pretending to be by Hippocrates. And so, like, there are now thousands of books by Hippocrates, but only like 10 of them are genuinely. This was a known problem even amongst Christian writers in the 5th century. Now, for Augustine, Augustine's slightly unusual because one of the big influences on him was this guy called Vindicianus, who had actually been the chief physician for Roman emperors

and was like a big deal and we have lots of his writings. And one day, he'd heard Augustine preaching before Augustine had really properly engaged with Christianity. And just took him to one side, it's like, look, mate, you are really clever. have you thought about using your intellectual chops for more sophisticated ends than what he was doing at that time? And so it was actually a physician who taught him the ropes on how to be really critical as an intellectual and to develop by it. So it's kind of interesting that's there. So there was an idea of then about how to bring Christian ideals and medicine into conversation with each other, which you would think that these really antithetical things, because Hippocrat,

and Gael and not Christians. And then what we're, so are Christians a bit worried about this pagan knowledge? And absolutely not because what he was doing. It's very sensible and sophisticated stuff. Then once you get to the Christian mid-aged, are then very interested in how you can take that knowledge and apply it into different circumstances. That's kind of really where the progress starts to happen.

And it's not just kind of like a defensive thing. It's, if God created the natural world, he created herbs, and herbs have natural properties that he gave to them. And therefore, by understanding the properties of herbs, we're understanding God's plan for nature. And so they actually find really easy to absorb lots of that. Because lots of this, lots of the stuff promoted by Hippocrates isn't, and then you swear to the pagan gods. Yeah. They're not interested in at that. A lot of hypocrisy stuff is about observation and natural things.

Like, okay, this old person is feeling ill and it's in the height of summer. Maybe it's because old people struggle in great heat and the old people have a different kind of constitution to younger people. And it's easier to feel better in autumn and things. Actually, lots of things that we would take, consider to be absolutely common sense. But you need somebody to kind of go and set it out and stone. So that's on the one hand. So they've embraced all this material. And then what we have a lot of that was quite interesting to start off with is collections of little recipes that are not part of that tradition, but just part of people collecting things as they go along.

Some of the earliest books are, here's a recipe book for travellers, so you don't have to trust dodgy doctors that you find in ports and marketplaces on your travel. It's going to read, Travelers Guide to Medicine. It's know your herbs and spices, and sometimes they're illustrated as well, so you can really know your herbs and spices as you travel around. And some of these things that they're looking for have come from all over the world. Ingredients that have to be imported from Indonesia and often like in China. And this is still the dark ages when people were not leaving their village, and yet they were getting ingredients imported from Indonesia, a bit more sophisticated and interconnected than they were maybe mating out. So that's then a huge thing.

So the one thing that people in the Latin Middle Ages are not doing, as we were kind of hinted at, is that they're not reading Greek. Wow, they're just like me. Greeks are sitting back and go, like, we've got all these books and you're not reading them. You mentioned the Arab translations. This is something that really starts to pick up all over the place. You've got from the 8th century onwards, Arab-speaking, like communities in Spain, all the way across North Africa. And those worlds are not cut off from the Christian ones. And we can find lots of evidence of Christian scholars chatting to Arab scholars all the way through.

And there's this kind of interesting, this kind of cultural thing where there are clearly bilingual cultures then of people sitting around and having their chat and go, what medicine you got them? And it's in southern Italy where it can really, there's a kind of kind of big cross-cultural thing happens. and once you get to the 11th century, there's a medical school in a small town of Salerno, which is a bit south of Naples, and this becomes a really, it's got an established tradition of teaching medicine for a while. Italy has a few schools where people talk about medicine.

Ravenna is quite good for a long time as well. But in Salerno, in the late 11th century, they get this guy called Constantine, the African. You're from Africa. What should we call you? who called Constantinian. I mean, the African is from the area of Iphrakia. So basically, he's from Tunisia. And he goes on this kind of big travel and he goes to Egypt to learn about stuff. And he may have gone as far as India and Ethiopia to learn about stuff. All that might be legendary. But he knows a lot of stuff, whatever. And he might, he's Arab speaking. He might be Muslim. But he definitely by the time he settles in monasteries in Europe, he's Christian. But there's a lot about his words. He's Arabic. life that we don't know and it's quite legendary. But the important thing is this guy turns up with a big bag of books and a lot of learning and I go, hi, I'm bilingual and I will translate lots of

stuff for you and tell you how things work. And everyone, this is brilliant. But then you can see lots and lots of things start to come in. Some of them are information that people had already being kind of garbled form or he does a few translations which people already had translations from Greek into Latin of these books, but they weren't very good. And so he does better ones. So the Arab to Latin thing involves a lot of transmission of Greek knowledge, but also lots of the things that Arab scholars had been building and improving it on. And this is then only encouraging them to get more exotting ingredients that you can only get from the far end of the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean spice trade routes.

And it's all very exciting. So by the time you get to the 11th, 12th century, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's almost like volumes and much as sophistication in a lot of cases, but also the books that Constantine is encouraging people to read include more theory. And that's the big thing that early Latin medicine, the things we're finding in our project, don't tend to have an awful lot of medical theory to them. A lot of its practical knowledge that Constantine is supposed to have said when he got to Italy, he was surprised at just just how little theory, but how much practice there was. Speaking of practice, there is a lot in terms of what you've found that is specifically about, you know, disciplines or practices.

And, you know, kind of a, I guess an idea of holistic healthcare, which I think, you know, in this age of wellness influencers, this is the sort of stuff that is really, you know, familiar to us. So what are we seeing in terms of interest in keeping yourself healthy year round and routine as a part of the conception. of health. I think one of the most important health principles that they work from is prevention is better than cure. As is something which we get in the wellness industry, marks it all the time, you know, have more blueberries for their anti-competencies. I see people are really interesting, what's the ingredient that I need. And so in terms of regiment, what we really see a lot of is year-long guides. These are super popular. We, We found loads and loads of these in the manuscripts that we've been looking at.

And they will go through each month and they will tell you things like in June, it's warm. You should be fasting most days. Drink a little bit of wine, but don't drink beer. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's August. Don't eat cabbage. But there's a variety of health tips that come through all the time.

When it's cooler, drink warm drinks, when it's warm, drink, cold drinks. When it's February, maybe think about having a warm bath. And it's just about regulating your lifestyle to go through the changes in the seasons, temperature, temperature, weather. What they are really drawing from Hippocratic medicine is a lot of ideas about balancing the humours. So you have a lot of phlegm in winter. And so what can we do to dry out the body? not just warming things but then yeah things that you'll dry you out which they like bread bread dries out their body well if they say so fair enough if they say so I don't I feel like I feel directly attacked as a Czech person ever being told to not eat cabbage or beer but okay go off that's fine

well only in the high other times a year it's fine I've been in Prague in in in in in in in the heights of summer in July and cabbage was not high on what I wanted. Okay. You're not invited back then. Anyway, what I also really like is one of the things that seem to come up a lot in the manuals that you found is my favorite stuff, which is prognostication things. You know, look, people can get mad about it all they want. They could say, okay, well, this is superstitious or this is kind of magical, but this is what I like.

you go, okay, like, I like a little bit of dallying in the margins with a diagnostic tool. And you found rather a lot of one of my good friends and yours, the sphere of Pythagoras. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sphere of Pythagoras is a great little tool. Whether it works. Even if it doesn't. Even if it doesn't work, people are really interested. And I think this is one of the big principles. about early medieval medicine overall. They're quite happy to include things which they might consider doubtful because they might work and you never know. And it's good to have it.

There's a reference point. The sphere of Pythagoras, sometimes the sphere of Apuleus, sometimes just the sphere of life and death. There are a few different versions of these, but these normally you have a little circle in the middle of the page and they have numbers and letters. and one I was looking at recently, you spell out the illness that you have just contracted and you take the letters and the letters correspond to numbers

and you do some calculations. And if the total at the end of it is one set of numbers, the numbers are at the top of the circle, you will live. But if they're at the bottom of the circle, you will die. And they're very dramatic. And often these things involve important calculations to do with the age of the moon in particular. And these are people who are really into just feeling that the moon has the influences it goes towards new moon and full moon. You know, you can see it in the oceans the way that the moon moves and pulls life on Earth.

And so they're super excited to think about how that is affecting the human body when it hits at different points. And so they love these calculations. I mean, some of them do get annotations that say, basically, this is heresy. But that although goes back to the early days of this stuff, and we mentioned Galen, who's like the great successor to Hippocrates, and he had to write stuff going, well, I'm kind of interested in prognostics, but you can't really say that it's on the same level as medicine, but it might be interesting.

So let's just kind of imagine that there are two different things that are. The way of not being attached Are you attempting witchcraft? No. No, it's not witchcraft. And thinking about how medicine ties into science, one of the reasons that people in the middle ages are really interested in these prognostic texts

is because they are super into their calendars and they are really into astronomy. These are the kind of, the astronomy side of things is where early medieval science is really, they love sitting outside, watching stars, watching things, theorising about the nature of the heavens and the earth. And so medicine fits into there kind of quite. There's lots of little notes, Isidore of Seville writing in the 7th century is really big into,

you should think medicine as a second philosophy because just as objects in heaven affect the earth, they affect the body too, and it's really important to know. So one of the reasons that people are really into prognostics is that they think this might be a scientific way where they can see the relationship between the natural world and their own personal health. And that's really exciting for them. And obviously, they can't often see that. And how can we distinguish between things being really bad and chaotic and things just being part of the regular way that the Lord has made nature? But it's, again, it's collecting materials so they can monitor and play little games, I think, sometimes.

I find that it really interesting too because, you know, terms like the sphere of Pythagoras, it's also clear that they're attempting to sort of put a kind of authority on it. So yes, okay, I'm using a numbers game to try to predict the outcome of the sex of a baby. Yeah. Okay, that's what I'm doing. But Pythagoras, am I right? Household name. You know, he says that this is possible. So, and I love that because it is so medieval. You know, this appealed to the authority of. classical authors in order to do this silly little thing that you want. Yeah. And I've already mentioned that people are really excited about, oh, it's by Hypocrates. It must be good. It must be like Galen. It must be really good. So much medicine is just completely anonymized.

And people don't entirely know, therefore, what to do with that as a body of knowledge. And therefore, they hope, yeah, they go. They go around and add these. the all things. The danger for them is that if this is just knowledge that doesn't have an authority behind it, is it all worthless? Because this is not how they're encountering things normally. I mentioned St. Augustine earlier. They like it when they can pick up a book and it says it's by St. Augustine. They like B. Do they like Constantine the African? It just feels a little bit safer rather than this anonymous treatise of uncertain background. It's just, tells us some very interesting stuff. People don't really like that very much.

But then there's also a kind of juxtaposition thing that can go in as well. So one of my favorite things that's well known about we didn't find it for this project, but we're working on it a little bit as a spin-off from this. It's got this one medical book, and it's a series of little letters, and it's the closest we do get to theory. And lots of them are a little advice on how to do bloodletting through the different seasons. How to be ethical as a doctor. which is lots of things like don't turn up drunk

and if a woman has to show you part of her body maybe look away if anything is sensitive, is exposed. So just like how to be of a good upstanding character. Christians really like this kind of hypocrite ethic because it kind of fitted quite nicely with Christian ethics, which is like to be a good upstanding person and be nice to people. It's quite kind of good.

The juxtaposition thing works where you then put in some letters that are by Hippocrates. So the ones that don't have an authority are then sitting alongside things that do have an authority. And so they kind of lean against each other. And the authority of the medicine is then transmitted as a whole. It doesn't matter that some of it's anonymous anymore. And this will then extend to lots of recipes as well. Or people will say, Theodore's recommendation on toothache is this. But, yeah. Pythagoras is recommendation. They just build up a whole list of names. And if you see a name, it's good stuff. All right. Well, speaking of your good stuff, we've got to talk about the lizard shampoo. All right. Look, we're going to talk about the lizard shampoo. What is the lizard shampoo exactly? And where did you find it talked about? And then also, follow up question. Do we know how people actually made the lizard shampoo? Well, this was a great fight. This is really my colleague and Karine Van Rhein at the University of Trect,

who she loves this one. Although she found it in a manuscript in the British Library in London. And it's in a calendar, again, a calendar, there's this little marginal note. And she's like, ooh, what's that? And I'll just read to you the recipe because it says, and these little lines, for flowing hair, cover the whole head with fresh summer savory and salt and vinegar, and then rub it with the ashes of a burnt green lizard mixed with oil. Not the lizard.

Our IP to our little friend. You burn the lizard and then you mix up into oil and then put it on your head. But this is interesting, right? Because certainly you can get shampoos today that involves vinegar or that, I personally am a person of salt shampoo, you know, which, so that's still something that's going along. So, I mean, the lizard, not so much, I hope and prey, but these are things that we are, we are still using. No lizards were harmed in the making of this person. Yeah, there's all sorts of ingredients.

I found another one in this manuscript from Poland where there was, basically, it's like a hair die, but the hair dye was like, break some eggs of a crow and mix it together. and put oil on your teeth so that when you put the crow's eggs on your head, your teeth don't get stained. I'll tell you what, leave those crows alone in the first place. And that's not what crow's eggs will do for your hair. Yeah. An interesting thing about this project that fits in quite nicely with the wellness side of things is the extent to which some of this then spins off into, yeah, like shampoo and head-dyes

and kind of other things like oil for the skin. and it's a proper full healthcare routine that starts to unfold and you get little ingredients. And a lot of thought is going into this. Some of it's interesting. I should say the thing about the lizard shampoo is we found one manuscript within. It's not every. We can't really say people in the middle ages all use lizards as part of their shampooing routine. That's not what we're saying. But this guy had picked this up.

I mean, he may have like bane a note of it because he thought it was completely absurd. Well, I find it interesting too because this is like a monk writing about it. And I'm like, my good brother in Christ, do you, are you not tonsured? Who needs voluminous flowing hair when we are shaving our paint as well? You know, and I know that monks are constantly doing this. You know, monks are constantly, they're always a one for doing the thing that they're not supposed to be doing, being as they've left the world. But, you know, who's out here with a hair care routine for brother Adolphus? I don't know.

Well, the thing about these monks and priests is it does look like a lot of them are actually part of their job is to go out into the community and help people out in all sorts of ways. So I said it's in a calendar. Often what we see is lots of these medicines are in priests' handbooks. So exactly the kind of case of people are wandering around, monks are wandering around. It's visiting the village this week. Anyone feeling bad about anything? Oh, it's cute. In your soul, I can help look after your soul and I can help look after your body.

And it's like, oh, this is great. One of the first books I looked at, which is now kept in the monastery of Sangallon and Switzerland, there's, it's obviously a monastery. But this medical book, you get to page three, and it has advice for women on how to get pregnant and how not to get pregnant. it's what are the monks doing? All right. All right. So if you imagine

that these are only monks who are doing things, this is completely irrelevant to them. Maybe they're just collecting it because it's a bit racy. But some of this material then is kind of exciting in that kind of context. Mentioned regimens where people have

month by month advice on what they should and should not be doing for their health. But some of it is like, oh yeah, it's cold to have lots of sex. This is advice you're copying in a Monastery. Come on, Kings. All right. I mean, they're not. They're not reading it like that. It's not legitimizing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. But it might then be that they are then going at it, when they're talking to communities about, it's like, well, you know, it's cold. You should probably

be having drinks with ginger in and doing activities that will keep you warm. I mean, like, they're practical people, right? You know, practical people. So it's kind of, it fits into a world of general knowledge. What the, We don't have a lot of, or we have some, are doctors. I mean, villages must have doctors, but where we can see specialist knowledge being kept, it is in these monastic libraries, it's in these church libraries,

by people who are also going to come out and they will advise you about other things to, about life and spirituality. So medicine is very much part of a general knowledge, and that that's then, kind of interesting as well because this this shows us it's not a specialist thing it's not something which the church is trying to keep secret from the people it's actually kind of a democratic thing where they they actually want to spread word about what is good for people because they don't

want people to suffer i mean not for that who needs a doctor when your monk can tell you how to have a really nice flowing hair and then also not how to get knocked up after you yeah everyone's super that. All right. Okay. So we've mentioned the lizards. We've mentioned crow eggs. Is it super common to find these animal ingredients in your health or your beauty compounds?

Are there other weird ones that you found? Not very many weird ones. Often, you know, milk eggs. Okay. Yeah, right. It's a very farmyard kind of thing. One of the first questions we asked. the classic, are we going to find lots of leeches?

And we find virtually no leeches. It was so disappointing. Jeff on the project, he says, again, we sometimes have found some cooked-up leeches, but it is kind of like cook up a leach and then like they dissolve into things and add it into a recipe. A lot of it is like a thousand and one weird recipes for mulled wine. Oh, they love a mulled wine, don't they? They love a mold wine. Vultures is quite a fun one that we found recently.

Okay. Because you can just take different bits of a vulture. So, I mean, there's one where you take its skull and you wrap it in a wolf pelt. And that helps against migraines. All right, okay, well, I'll try that. I'm desperate at this point. Okay, whatever it takes, yeah. If you get the vultures eyes and then wrap it in fox pelt, that will help if your eyes are hurting.

So, again, this is not a super common thing, but it's out there as part of the mix. Now, having said that, one of the funny, interesting things that we were also finding is that then veterinary medicine often then gets round up into this as well. So on the one hand, there's interesting what are the healing benefits of the animals. But it's also, how can all this help the animals? And so if your cow is sick, you maybe try this recipe, this thing. I mean, sometimes these are like creams that you can make to put on them to cool them down or warm them up or make them feel better. And so the distinction between animal medicine and human medicine is as sketchy as the difference between medicine and healthcare regimes, which is all super interesting. Because it's, you know, what are they thinking of when they hear the word medicine?

they're clearly just thinking anything to do with healing and feeling good. It's kind of nice. I mean, I guess animals have bodies, we have bodies, we're trying to affect them in a particular way.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, I want to drag you back to prognostication. I'm going to do it. Of course. She's doing it, folks. Okay, so we've got Spear of Pythagoras. Shout out to a legend. But you also found a lot of specifically

prognostic calendars, right? And what I was quite interested in was this concept of the Egyptian days. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so the Egyptian days are, these are something else that fit very nicely into our medieval monks' obsessions with the calendar. It's that there are throughout the year, there are a couple of days each month, which are super unlucky. And so they're, and these are the Egyptian days.

And so it's associated with, you know, these are identified by the people in Alexandria. They're talking about authorities for medical knowledge. The schools in Alexandria places are wonderful and they're good for astronomy. And because they get clear skies in Egypt, it's not cloudy. It's really difficult to do the same kind of sky watching in Ireland, sadly. So the Egyptian days are a really big thing. and you get little tables of them. They get added to normal calendars all over the place.

And then we often get little commentaries about them. So the advice, you know, these are bad days to fall ill. These are definitely bad days to do bloodletting. I mean, they're really kind of into bloodletting, but only on particular times that, you know, don't do it when it's super hot because that's stupid, you'll feel faint. But to do it on Egyptian days, you might die. There's no mincing their words about this

It's like risk of death And these fit quite nicely as well So with dog days which are the hottest days of the year That's often associated with Sirius the dog start Because when that rises in the sky in the summer And the sun is near it in the sky Well that will mean that it's twice as hot And this is not an observable phenomenon

That's not actually what happens But it's a belief and some of this medicine does revolve around belief as well as practice and observable things. But they do know you have to be careful about when to draw blood and when not, because if you just do it every day, then that's really bad for you. So you should only do it at good times. It's then interesting for thinking about how the calendar as a whole is this kind of very dangerous terrain of good days and bad days for all sorts of activities. and so there's a related genre of calendar as well

that will not just Egyptian days and dog days but they will just break down when you fall ill if you look up what the age of the moon is then it has a huge effect on whether you are going to live whether you're going to die whether the illness is going to be really long whether you should call a doctorate very quickly whether you should just go to bed and sleep it off but these text are then quite really

detailed about thinking about all the different patterns that could fall from just what day of the week it is and how how the natural world is moving around you. And I think this is a really interesting thing because there's this tendency to relate to these things and, you know, these ideas of the stars or the calendar as having effects on medical outcomes as specifically superstitious. And don't get me wrong, it is a little bit of a superstition. But I think think what people often miss about this is how important astronomy is to the classical and medieval world. And this idea that this is an observable, practicable thing that is happening. You know, this is one of the things that one learns. I mean, certainly later when we invent universities, astronomy is one of the big ones. And it's not like this is magic. It's like, well, this is a part of the universe. All these things are connected. And you know, Aristotle would tell you this as much as anyone in the 8th century, but we do have this tendency to say, oh, well, that's silly now. Like, what do you mean the dog star has anything to do with this? But I think for these people, this is an application of an observable knowledge, no? Yeah, exactly. It's thinking about what the rules of nature are. Now, what they're often not saying is that all the rules of nature are.

factually true so much as plausible. I once heard this historian make this great argument. The thing that we often get confused when we're talking about things like medieval medicine is they're not saying everything is true or false. What they're actually saying is that there is a degree of probability here. Most scientists actually talk about degrees of probability. And so to say, this is silly and this is not silly,

it kind of misses some of the point. And what they really like about astronomy, one of the reasons it really appeals to them, exactly that you can look at the stars and you can chart the course of the moon and you can chart the course of Mars. You know that that constellation is going to be visible at this time of the era and not the next. And it just works and it keeps going over and over and over forever. So it's rule-driven stuff. What they do not like in this period is the idea that you might be able to predict very much on the basis of this. There's a difference between prediction and

cycles. Because you don't have to predict that the moon is going to be full again 29 and a half days after the last time that it was full. That's just what it does. And so that's completely different. And the kind of prediction that they're really talking about is like there's been an earthquake. This means that within three days somebody will die. And they'll say, well, of course somebody will die. People die all the time. So medicine, if it is a natural thing, then does it fit into the same? And so there's a difference between prognostics which are guessing at the future and ones where it's trying to observe a natural order of things. And I think that's sometimes what those older scholars of the history of medicine were missing out when they were just dismissing everything is a bit silly.

people in this period are really interested to see what the rules are. And they often accumulate these texts. They often accumulate multiple versions of the same text, which is kind of really interesting. Because that doesn't say that they believe one is true. What they're already doing then is, okay, I've got ten different calendars that will tell us about how illness might play out. Wolderbert has just fallen ill. We shall sit and look at Woldebert with our book. books. Now, I mentioned the monastery of Sangalan in Switzerland earlier, and that they have this,

from the 9th century, a sketch of what an ideal monastery should look like. And they have separate rooms for ludletting and people who are ill and there's a separate room for the library. And the library is quite close to where all the sick people are in the monastery. And there's a herb garden as well, of course. So they've got to collect all the stuff for their ingredients. And this guy, Valfred, who writes a poem about it as well. It's great stuff. But anyway, the point being here that this is then all kind of joined up, it wouldn't take you very much for one of them to go and get a couple of those books of medicine and come back over here and we'll just see, we'll just see how Waldemar is doing with his illness today and just monitoring it.

You know, surely this is what practical knowledge is about. It is about observation. It's not about being gullible. And there's actually quite a lot of literature that's circulates about don't be gullible. Don't take stuff just because a doctor tells you. Learn it. Learn what herbs do. Learn what spices do. Learn what this concoction will do for you. Don't take it on trust because quite frankly some people out there are complete con people. And this is not a good way to health. So I think that's how we had to, partly having all this extra information that we have now about early medieval medicine, what we want to be able to do with this is going to create a bigger profile of how they're collecting information so that they can

think about what may or may not be true, not to be gullible, but actually so that they can avoid being gullible and just like make decisions based on sound knowledge. That was a really good point. Thanks, Jeff. I want to drag you on to one of my favorite topics, though. Okay, so you're going to have to forgive me. I think I worked on a bit during my math. and that I've always been interested in is when you find medical manuals or even I wrote a paper on this in herbariums, when you find incantations or prayers or charms that are said. And, you know, one of the things I noticed a lot in herbariums is you'll find one herbarium and it'll say, oh, you say this little prayer over the sage and then that helps it be better. And then in other herbariums, it'll say, ooh, you say this little incantation over the sage. And then in other herbariums, it'll say, ooh, you say this little incantation over the age. And I was always trying to figure out, you know, what's the difference between saying the

prayer and saying the incantation, you know, is there, has someone stepped in here to change these things? But I think it's quite interesting because we see all the time incantations or talismans, especially used in childbirth. And I'm, you know, again, this kind of goes into the realm of the superstitious or the spiritual. And I think that this is a really important point because I think that people tend to think that there is a kind of strict cutoff between acceptable Christianity and superstition. But I think that what you've really found here is that this is really blurry, you know, that sometimes, you know, you've got a prayer and sometimes you've got an incantation and it's all seen as fair play to an extent. Yeah, it's really blurry.

And I think that this speaks very much about this idea that it's all part of a created natural world that is there to be understood. But if God miracles are part of that, how do they fit in? Now, we see that a lot of theologians are quite keen to point out with healing as much as anything is that this is not a free-for-all. The laws of nature are not so plastic that anything can happen. Can you tell the difference between when God is doing something, a saint is doing something, or it's a demon, and all these things? But all these people, people, they don't really know, but you see, you have little guidebooks. So even when we have things where, you know, get some specific herbs and write something on them, big leaf herbs,

and something, and that increases its magical formula. I mean, this is, sometimes this is just starts off as a superstition, but then once it becomes a prayer, are they then kind of Christianizing this and kind of like finding on the acceptable side of, does this mean that enough people found that this was broadly worked or they found it reassuring. And it probably does. And Claire on our project has found lots of examples where we've had recipes where people have added. Sometimes it is a prayer. Sometimes it is just a turn of phrase, which makes it out to be a little bit more Christian. But there's a really good route for all of this that within the Bible is that Luke, the author of one of the gospels, is supposed to be a medic, and he uses some specifically medical terminology. So that's interesting for people.

And this then kind of like trickles all the way in about, you know, Jesus is going around healing people. said that super interesting. And he's doing things to help me. He's like go and get this ingredient and saying things around them. So this is then fully built into, well, we expect the medicine will work somehow and we are Christians. And so the Lord will heal us. So there has to be this kind of thing that we then build into medicine to make it work. But then where the line is that when is something demonic and pagan and when it's something Christian, because a lot of medicine the way we're finding is neither one thing on the other. If you just got something that says get some cinnamon and mix it with some wine and some honey and then drink it at night time,

that just sounds like a night drink. Yeah, it does. Yeah, where people are going, but this is so that there's enough of it there where a lot of the status of the knowledge is, is debatable, but people believe it, some of it, is quite effective and it's really useful. Some of it gets very creative. So you see in the 10th century, it's the 11th century, the intrusion of things, not just demons, but in old English medicine, you get elves. Elves turn up as well. It's super exciting. But then this kind of built up into what is going on here is a battle between good and evil. The nonic ill creatures, be they elves or demons. And the Christians have to fight back about this. I mentioned right at the beginning, sometimes that scholars looked at medicine and

they didn't know what the words meant. And I think actually quite often Christians in the 8th, 9th, 10th century were looking at slightly garbled Latin that's not how they would have written things or certainly not how they would spell things either. I have no idea what this word means, but it says here I have to shout out. Is it invoking a demon? It's like, it's just a word. Barely pronounceable one with no vowels.

So you could see how things. become folk practice that are neither pagan nor Christian, and things can get quite a long way or that in the same way that tossing a penny into a well, is that pagan? It's just tossing a penny into a well, isn't it? That similar kind of thing must be like when you take this collection of herbs, say gobbledy, gobbledy, gopid, you all feel better. But part of the ritual of talking and doing little ritual acts on the side, everyone makes it feel better. This This is how faith healing works, but it's also do something to make your soul feel better. It's not just about how your body feels better.

If you psychologically feel inspired to be healthy, that will help. And so a lot of this is then built into the medicine that we're looking at, whereas the ritual elements help people's health to improve as much as there are, things in the recipes that they're taking that do actually have antibacterial properties and purgative effects and things. Well, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, Because we tend to see, you know, the herbs and spices that come up over and over again, you know, like here's some cinnamon, here's some cloves, or honey, right? And honey is useful. We know that honey is a useful thing that it can help in terms of, it's got, you know, anti-bacterial properties, I think it is. You know, do you have any sense of how effective things might have been when they come up over and over again? I think the commonality of use is something that does rather speak to people have tried this and it seemed to work or it worked sometimes, but not every time.

And some of that might be look, but if there's an observable thing that keeps something in the mix over and over again, that's a great thing. And people have done some great work with not just medieval historians talk to people who work in pharmacy and actually start making up. not inventing, but they make up some of these recipes and try them out. There was one a few years ago that seemed to have some like juices in hospitals for tackling superbugs and things a little bit anyway. And when they make up these recipes, people have looked into the actual medicinal properties and that they are genuine. And so it's no surprise that the people keep coming back to them time and time again. This is not like just vacuous herbal remedies in the bad sense of herbal remedies. Have a nice cup of tea and you will feel magically better.

There's real benefits to these things. And they use lots of the ingredients that we would use for the same. You have a cough. You have something with honey. Oh, yeah, I suddenly feel much better. Oh, what a surprise. They are on board with all this as we are. And so the effectiveness of medicine must be something that keeps it in their mind.

I mean, I suppose we'd see this stuff all the time. You know, if your tummy hurts, you can have a peppermint tea that helps. Liquorish genuinely does help intestinal issues. You know, there are all these sorts of things that we see crop up. And I think that's important. I think it's important to kind of note that this isn't just superstitious nonsense that's going on. Is there some superstitious nonsense? Yes, but that's not the only thing that's happening.

And we would underestimate how much of our medicine also has a little. bit of superstitious nonsense in it. It's not like these people were idiots and we're super clever. Yeah, I mean, lots of us are in exactly the same boat as they were. Yeah, and I just think that it's so interesting to see how this kind of gets passed down. I suppose what I want to ask you in the last thing is what are we going to do with all this awesome research? Where do you see it going next? What are our plans? We have a whole sweeping bag of things we're going to do with this. We want to make this more accessible to people. We are editing and translating lots of it so that people can just read it as it was with some commentary so they can understand it. We are writing together

a little introduction to early medieval medicine that will just serve as a nice accessible primer so that people can find out about the funny things without having to wade through all the really weird texts. We're going to do more things like this, more podcasts. We're going to do more things like this, more podcasts. We have a blog on a website where we talk about favorite things as we come across them. And yeah, we want to make this kind of public knowledge and then how public will react to that, what they find interesting will probably help guide where we take it next because there's no point just us doing this for us. We want to do it for people who are interested in old herbal remedies and rituals and there are lots of people out there. So interesting

to see what they think. Well, James, you are, as always, a delight. And thank you so much for coming out and talking to me about all of this. Thanks for having me, Ellen. My thanks once again to Professor James Palmer and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you're interested in the theories behind medieval medicine, why not check out our past episode on Medicine in the Middle Ages? Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.