This book has been about the interaction of religion and medicine, seen from a particular and hitherto unfamiliar standpoint. Other studies have focussed on Christus medicus, medicine and theology, clerical physicians, hospitals and healing miracles, for example, but these important themes have only been glanced at here. The agency of religious in healing, and their contribution to medical literature in the medieval era, with which this book deals, have not, by comparison, been the subject of much historical attention. The focus of the various chapters of the book has been on the orders of friars and medicine in England from their first arrival to their dispersal in 1536–8, with a final look at the survival of friars’ medicine in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The agency of the English friars in healing and writing medicine has been recovered from the evidence supplied by manuscripts they compiled and owned, still surviving in scattered fashion in (mostly) English libraries. One chapter of the book, however, has tried to see the friars’ activities in this ‘secular’ sphere through the eyes of others, mostly unsympathetic, rather than those of the friars themselves.

The result of this attempt at recovering the agency of the English friars emphasises the extent to which their healing practice did not differ widely from that of non-religious healers. The scope of the friars’ practice took in all the areas of diagnosis, prognosis, regimen and therapeutics taught in universities and practised for profit by secular healers. This is surprising insofar as there were canonical prohibitions and regulations of the friars themselves that would seem to have rendered certain areas of medicine out of bounds to them. Yet there is plentiful evidence that friars did practise surgery, let blood, take women patients and heal female disorders, and dabble in prognostic and therapeutic methods which had been condemned by religious authorities. The friars treated their own brethren, but also practised both charitable and forprofit medicine, just like the seculars. They took fees and might even be sued in court for failing to deliver on their contracts with patients. To all intents and purposes it would seem that friars as healers were practising as an integral part of the medical economy of late medieval England – something missed out of general studies of the period.