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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:05.253)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Meg Lea, Associate Professor of History at Binghamton State University of New York. She specializes in the political and cultural history of late antique and medieval Europe, and we're talking about her book, Embodying the Soul, Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe. Dr. Lea, wonderful to have you on today.
Meg Leja (00:29.774)
Thank you so much. It's really great to be here.
PJ (00:32.793)
So, you know, normally I ask why I write this book, but I think the first thing, because I got an undergrad in history and I still had to look it up to make sure I was on the right timeframe. Carolingian, it might say, even if I'm saying that right, Carolingian Europe. What time period is that and what do we need to know about that to understand your writing?
Meg Leja (00:53.13)
Yeah, no, I mean, I can completely relate. I registered for a course in my second year of undergrad on the Carol Inchens, and I showed up to it, and the professor was talking about Charlemagne, and I was thinking, I was, you know, do I remember who Charlemagne is? I'm not sure.
my friend dropped the class and I was thinking maybe I should drop the class too. I really don't know anything about this time period but you know of course as you can predict that course ended up being kind of foundational to my whole life and my career for sure. So we're in I mean the period I focus on is the ninth century in particular the Carolingians come to power and right in the middle of the eighth century so 751 and
PJ (01:10.693)
Yeah.
Meg Leja (01:34.162)
You know, the kingdom turns into an empire in 800 when Charlemagne is crowned emperor by the pope in Rome on Christmas Day. And, you know, the Carolingian Empire, sorry, that's quite the gift. Yes, I know. But one that, you know, according to his biographer, Charlemagne was not, you know, he wasn't too enthusiastic and he had to kind of be dragged into this whole thing.
PJ (01:45.777)
That's quite the gift. Yes. Sorry.
Meg Leja (02:00.258)
So, we're thinking about the end of the Carolingian Empire, we're getting to the end of the 9th century. And in terms of geography, modern day France, Germany, northern half of Italy, Netherlands. So it's often referred to as the most successful of the post-Roman successor states in the West.
You know, it's an often forgotten moment, but it's a really important historical time period in terms of giving us many of the texts, many of the church institutions, forms of monasticism that turn out to be incredibly important to the history of Western Europe.
PJ (02:44.921)
Yeah, and this is where, one, history seems to be moving so fast now, like our time period, it's changing so fast, that we don't realize, when we talk about 100 years back then, not as much happened change-wise, right? And so it's really interesting to trace some of the things. Even if I remember correctly, the Third Reich, and we talk about the Nazis,
the 1900s, right, is a reference to the Holy Roman Empire. Is that correct?
Meg Leja (03:22.663)
Yeah, right. So a lot of my students show up and they want to call the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire. That I tell them, it's really just the Carolingian Empire. We don't get to the Holy Roman Empire until later. But yes, I mean, you're right that it's kind of associated with Charlemagne being crowned emperor in 800. So you're not wrong, but that is generally thought of as a later historical.
PJ (03:33.46)
Oh, okay.
PJ (03:43.429)
Yeah.
PJ (03:50.913)
Yeah, and even as you're talking about the Pope giving over power and stuff like that, I was just trying to draw in what I knew. Even I just had a friend who a few years ago converted to Catholicism, and then he started talking to me about how, you know, really the church should be able to use the sword. And he's like referencing, you know, like the political power of the Pope in the Carolingian Empire, you know. And so even today, we feel the influence of this.
Meg Leja (04:10.402)
Yeah.
PJ (04:21.177)
But talk to us a little bit about your thesis, your overall point for the book, because I found that really fascinating.
Meg Leja (04:28.558)
Well, I mean, you know, the book in some ways attempts to deal with this notion of dark age medicine and, you know, how did people cure the body? How do they even understand the body in this period? You know, that is conventionally known as the dark ages. And so it is, you know, in very broad terms, an attempt to rebut these stereotypes. You know, people were not...
crazy superstitious and simply treating the body using weird kind of folk remedies and charms nor were they habitually just covered in mud and not caring at all about their bodily habits. So, I mean, in very broad terms, the book tries to argue that the Carolingian period is a really important moment if we're thinking about the history of medicine because it's a moment in which...
PJ (05:06.437)
Hahaha
Meg Leja (05:21.774)
kind of the whole endeavor to care for the body according to human intervention, right? So versus miraculous cure. So humans attempt to understand the natural world, to use that natural world to intervene in the fate of a suffering body, whether it will recover, whether it will be chronically ill for a long time, whether it will eventually die. This is what we're thinking about, human agency here.
And the Carolingians really, you know, if we look at their manuscripts, if we look at surviving texts from that period, we see a major push to say this is something that though it has origins in the pagan world, right? And we're thinking here of figures like Hippocrates and Galen, so, you know, Greco-Roman, major Greco-Roman thinkers, even though it has these pagan origins, you know, and even though God can cure miraculously, that this is something that a Christian should be engaged with.
And, you know, the doctor becomes a holy figure. Medicine is seen as a tool, really, by which the soul can be affected, and the body can be made a more appropriate vessel for the soul to inhabit during its life on Earth. And thus, you know, we're thinking about this push for salvation, that the Carolingians are really, I mean, if we're thinking about politics here,
you know, that is a major endeavor of the Carolingians is to make sure that everyone within the kingdom, within the empire is striving towards that ultimate goal and doing so together. So a lot of the political and religious reforms that the Carolingians carry out, you know, are motivated to ensuring that, you know, everything is in line with what God wants and that every single kind of body and soul within the kingdom is striving together for, you know, eternal life.
So it's really important to keep in mind for us, because it's a very different kind of foundational political ethos than what we have, obviously, in our modern world. But despite that, I think, you know, and this is perhaps the most important point, despite that huge difference, you know, the Carolingians approach the care of the body in a rational manner and in a way that, you know, looks remarkably familiar to us, you know, and what they understand by medicine looks very similar to what we would define.
PJ (07:11.875)
Yeah, so.
Meg Leja (07:41.73)
medicine. And so, you know, for us this is a real this should be as historians a really important moment to engage with and for the most part historians have not engaged with it so hence the book.
PJ (07:52.161)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like, you're filling an important gap here. The one I would love to talk about this idea of salvation is motivation more. I'd love to talk about this kind of reception of the classical tradition and even this idea of like metaphors that kind of move across disciplinary, whether you wouldn't even call these disciplinary lines back then. I understand that's anachronistic. But like the way that the they used body terminology to talk about the kingdom, those sorts of things.
Um, but I am going to go for the, the cheap and, um, hilarious question, which is talk to me a little bit about hair removal because that was such a great way to start the book.
Meg Leja (08:36.283)
Well, I have to say, so here maybe I'll preface this with saying, you know, one of the reasons that I became a historian of the Carolingian period is I just, I mean, many of these texts get at my sense of humor almost in a way as well. It's a really fun period to study because there are enough texts that you can kind of do something with them, you know, but there's not.
PJ (08:46.88)
Okay.
Meg Leja (08:58.41)
It is a period in which there are very few surviving sources, relatively speaking, so you have to do a lot with them. But that also means that there's kind of a host of characters, and you can kind of get to know them. I don't know, one has a sense of their different quirks and personalities, and I really enjoy that. So yeah, given that, I wanted to start my book with something that I found amusing. I know it had been a long-standing joke between myself and my family that I could maybe, if not make it rich as a historian.
developed one of these remedies for either producing or removing hair and kind of marketing make my make my way make my fortune. So I mean hair removal seems like one of those you know bodily techniques that is on the you know not very important but in fact hair had this huge significance for the Carolingian dynasty because they replace a dynasty that had been in place since the Roman
PJ (09:29.325)
Yeah.
Meg Leja (09:55.594)
period, so since the Roman Empire, and had ruled for, you know, over 250 years. So it's a really big moment in 751 when the Carolingians seized power. And this previous dynasty had in some ways symbolized but more than that. The power of their family was really embedded in this long hair that they had. So the Merovingians are known as the long-haired kings. And when the Carolingians come to power, they do not have long hair. They keep it short.
So we have the political significance of hair. We also have, of course, a religious significance of hair. Most people will be familiar with the religious tonsure, right, that you would get as a monk. So, you know, it struck me as not entirely surprising when then we turned to these manuscripts that survive of various medical remedies. And I was seeing, you know, a lot of remedies for hair removal. There are also some to encourage hair growth. So, you know, I think we're starting to see here,
you know, I guess I should preface this by explaining that, you know, a lot of these herbal remedies had been seen as kind of, for a long time by historians as, you know, things that monks and intellectuals copied, but without necessarily kind of thinking through them. And when we see these, all these remedies for hair removal, we're starting to think, ah, no, there might be some intersection with political and religious culture going on here, and that, you know, the way in which people copied remedies actually might have.
greater significance, right? These might be conscious actors who are engaging with a medical tradition in a really active way and sorting through what is useful for them. So that's perhaps what drew me to the hair anecdotes that begin my book. And we have this famous grandson of Charlemagne called Charles the Bald, so hair really does come up a lot with the caracal.
PJ (11:43.993)
There you go. Oh, I love it. Yeah, I mean, the idea of you running an MLM with the arsenic cure for hair, just, I could see why that, like, what just happened? No. Can you talk a little bit, you just mentioned it a little bit. This movement, you know, medicine kind of went into the monastery and then it came out in this form of what they called the medicus.
Meg Leja (11:52.61)
Yes. Yeah.
PJ (12:09.897)
I obviously, I'm learning how to say Carolingian, so I'm not sure if I said medicus right, but can you talk about that movement to the monastery and out to what we would normally think of as doctors?
Meg Leja (12:23.046)
Yeah, so I think what's important to explain here is that for a long time, this dark age medicine, so medicine between, you know, the end of the Roman Empire and say the 12th century, when we first start to see universities forming and medicine being a subject that is being studied at these medieval universities. So this whole period of dark age medicine has really been dismissed by historians and by classicists as
you know, a bunch of monks kind of not really knowing what they were doing, because it was monks who were mostly copying texts. And, you know, maybe they copied out some of these, you know, pagan Greco-Roman remedies because, you know, they were interested in the names of ancient authors. Or maybe they were just for a while, people were like, maybe they were just kind of scribal exercises and people are copying out cures without really thinking about them. In any case, all of this has been seen, you know, to be a fairly thoughtless endeavor.
And at the same time that they were copying these classical texts, monks were also corrupting them because they were religious and religion and medicine are incompatible, right? This basic assumption that informs so much really of how historians approach subjects like this. And it really does persist. So monks were corrupting this medicine with their religious, Christian biases. And I really...
to some extent this is not an untrue story because monasteries are centers where texts are copied. It is in large part probably monks who are engaging with the medical tradition and who were Christianizing it as I explained a few minutes ago. At the same time we have to totally throw out our stereotypes of what a monastery is in this period. Monasteries are hubs of this empire right? They are places where people are meeting.
where intellectual experiments are taking place, there are economic centers, the nobility has all of these, it's claws, I guess, in the monasteries. I mean, it's sending sons and daughters there and it's maintaining those networks as a way to kind of increase political influence, as a way to manage lands and wealth.
Meg Leja (14:37.446)
And certainly, you know, the relationship between the king or emperor and different bishops and different Abbots of important monasteries, Abbots and Abbesses. You know, these are very important political links. So monasteries are essential to the intellectual, political and economic life of this kingdom. And so when we think about the medicine that is actually being copied there, you know, this is no kind of...
It's no side endeavor. Like, you know, it's very likely that this was something that was encouraged at the court of Charlemagne, that monks were taking up at the monastery as a kind of, you know, instruction, like copy these texts. You know, they're important in terms of how we're conceptualizing our, you know, our mission as rulers of this land. And so, you know, it...
monks are in ways kind of experimenting with how these bodily cures should look. And if we look at evidence, for example, we have this plan of kind of what an ideal monastery might look like from the year 830 called the plan of St. Gall, we see that there's a whole complex within the monastery devoted to medical care.
There's a room for taking baths. There's a kitchen for the preparation of specific types of food. So here we're thinking about dietary medicine and providing meat and more sustaining foods to monks and perhaps visitors, people coming to the monastery for treatment who are ill. We have a whole room devoted to bloodletting and purgatives. So there's a whole like huge latrine actually attached to this room, which should give you a sense if you don't know what a purgative is, right? Coming out.
PJ (16:01.061)
Hmm.
Meg Leja (16:24.578)
both ends. So bloodletting purgatives, we have a store room full of drugs, we have a room for the chief doctor, so it's a very, you know, we have a herb garden as well. It's a very developed complex showing the kinds of resources that a monastery might think of devoting towards the care of the body. And these are innovations, right? These are things that the monasteries of the Carolingian realm would have been developing. So this
you know, medicine, right? This is a very rational, like highly thought out medical plan that we see coming out of these monasteries. And so the medicus, the medicus is simply the term for doctor. And you know, the idea of a doctor is certainly nothing new in the Carolingian period, but what we see is that the role of the doctor is being sanctified.
Right, so rather than someone who simply kind of cares for the body and, you know, it's like has a lesser position compared to the person who cares for the soul, and this might be like an abbot or a priest or a bishop, right? The kind of language that's being used in many of these texts that the Carolingians are copying and producing, you know, describes the doctor as someone who sees invisible things, right, who cares for spiritual matters as well as physical matters.
For someone who is essentially an agent of God, right, who has a role kind of appointed by God to care for the body, but in caring for the body also, you know, because body and soul are a unity, you know, has to think of the whole person. And so it's really in the ninth century argue that we see the physician taking on this kind of honorable position within society, this, you know, really respectable role that is going to continue. I mean, that has...
a long history, you know, with ups and downs, but the Carolingian period is an important moment in terms of how we think of the role of the doctor now.
PJ (18:29.121)
Yeah, it's really interesting. I had on Paul Craddock on to talk about his book, Spare Parts. And for him, I think it started like the 15th or 14th century. I should know that better, but I can't remember. But basically, at that point, it had declined back again to where doctors were barbers, and they were like not someone to be trusted, right? And so you see these fluctuations. But one of the things I appreciated that you showed some of the political motivations of
Carolingian reform to Merovingian reform, the fact that because there was a political disjuncture, then it allowed the critique of many other things. And so we see the rise of something like this.
Meg Leja (19:11.562)
Yes, exactly. No, that's so important because the Carolingians really have to justify, how do we deserve to rule? The Merovingians had been in place since the Romans. They had this long hair. They had this mystique about their dynasty. And so in coming to power, the Carolingians need to show that they have divine favor. And so this is not a new argument at all by any means. But.
But my point is that medicine is part of this, right? That the Carolingians turn the care of the body into something that is part of this imperial mission. And so rather than being kind of relegated to the sideline, we should really be thinking about the physical component of the self, what the care of the body looks like, this push for health as being essential to how we understand the early Middle Ages.
And too often, I think we're kind of thinking dark ages, religious superstition. And as historians push back against that, they really have focused a lot on what the care of the soul looks like on how religion and politics intersect. But all of that still is a focus on the soul and spiritual matters. And I think there's just been this.
this gap, as you said earlier, right? Where we're not thinking about what the physical looks like, even to think about, even to the extent of, you know, what did the Carolingians, how did they imagine the body? You know, what did they talk about when they talked about it? They don't talk about it that much explicitly, but we have all of these manuscripts full of medical texts. And, you know, you rarely kind of hear about them in broader histories of the Carolingian period, but these are really important. I mean, these are the first witnesses to a lot of, you know, Hippocratic texts.
um, you know, Latin, there are first instance of Latin medicine and, you know, the fact that medicine ends up being a subject that is studied at, you know, Latin universities, right? At universities in Western Europe, you know, how can we not be thinking about the foundation that was laid in the early middle ages here? It's very important.
PJ (21:23.509)
And that's what you talked about, the translations that become even more important following up is really in response to this. And it's the translation movement that leads us to the Renaissance and the Reformation. And all of a sudden, what a lot of people think of is like the important parts of history, right? Or as Philomena Kunk says, the renaissance. But the, I don't know if you're familiar, she's a BBC person, but.
Meg Leja (21:47.958)
I don't know, sorry.
PJ (21:53.241)
As we talk about those sorts of things, it's really interesting you mentioned that salvation was the motivation and the way that they talk about the body and there's that implicit metaphor about the body that is then used to describe the political. And that's where even as you talk about these abbots and abbesses being political powers, a lot of that comes from that body and
PJ (22:21.953)
Salvation is something and this is something that I think we've lost in today's culture where we think of salvation is a very personal thing Right, like, you know what we talked about like someone's born again or saved right? Like you're like, okay That's like your thing you're doing your thing and in and these terms it was very political because it was whole communities Like salvation was a very much a whole World before you see this distinction and you've talked about this quite a bit already but
Meg Leja (22:29.538)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (22:50.233)
this distinction between the separation between church and state. Like that's not like the Pope is like dragging Charlemagne right into, like, you're going to be emperor and like, you are going to like fill these, like these, like these different seats. Can you speak a little bit to how that motivation and that metaphor kind of carried itself out?
Meg Leja (22:59.284)
Thanks.
Meg Leja (23:13.962)
Yeah, I mean, what's so interesting is that there, you know, there is no separation between church and state in this period and that everything is much more local. So you know, we've talked, we've ended up talking a lot about the pope, but really, as I continually stress, you know, this is the start of the semester, this is all in my mind, I keep stressing to my students, forget everything you thought you knew about the pope. Because, you know, yes, there's a pope and yes, the Carolingians kind of court the pope and the pope courts them and you know, it's a relationship of...
mutual aid. But the pope is not that important a figure. There's no clear kind of hierarchical church in the way that we think about it in the early Middle Ages. Instead, politics and religion is much, much more local. Although for the Carolingians, we're thinking imperial local. So they're trying to make sure that all practices across the empire are uniform to the end that you just mentioned, right? To this end of trying to ensure that everyone
is basically kind of on the same track. Everyone has their different roles within society and those are all good, but ultimately we are all striving for the same thing. And this is the foundation on which the Carolingians really build their legitimacy. We are going to ensure that everything is operational in terms of justice, in terms of how priests are behaving, in terms of how monks and nuns are praying within the monasteries. Everything is kind of a...
a tightly working network to make sure that God is happy and everyone is moving towards that goal. But what's interesting is that, you know, it's also a real way to hold those in power accountable. So, you know, political messages that come up again and again in the Carolingian period are like, if you, as a king or as a bishop, if you do not make sure...
that everyone under you is functioning in the way that they ought to be, like your soul will be held accountable by God on judgment day. So you, you know, that's, that's the threat, right? The ultimate threat. So it's a real way to make sure that people are not, you know, to try to ensure anyways, that there is no abuse of power. And again, to stress that, you know, although everyone has their tasks, you know, the ruler and those in charge have this greater task of making sure that everyone is kind of.
Meg Leja (25:35.01)
behaving, you know, if they want to ensure that they themselves have God's favor. So that's interesting. And in terms of metaphors, yeah, you know, I think you can begin to see this is supposed to be an optimally functioning body, right? Everyone has, you know, a different, they don't necessarily talk about everyone having a different body part, but they're certainly talking a lot about this metaphor of the soul and the body working together.
right, that this is a harmonious partnership. And we have, you know, the political leader, we have, you know, the king as the body, and we have the bishops. So again, not the pope, the bishops as the soul. And, you know, how can one part work without the other, right, they always need to be in communication. They always need to be maintaining this harmonious relationship. So, you know, we really see an understanding of individual identity that is bipartite, right? We have a spiritual and a physical.
And those could be, you know, in opposition. You know, we're thinking about Paul and metaphors of like the body fights against the spirit, or the spirit, sorry, the spirit fights against the body. You know, and this kind of notion of aggression, but you know, part of what I try to argue is that in a lot of different genres in the Carolingian period, we're seeing this emphasis instead on cooperation, right? The spiritual and the physical need to cooperate in order for progress to be made.
So that kind of communal, harmonious, smoothly functioning, healthy organism, you know, this infuses a lot of Carolingian political and religious rhetoric.
PJ (27:16.577)
Yeah, and can you talk a little bit to, you mentioned it here, they're kind of, they're working through things with, you know, Paul as a theologian, they're working through things with Galen and with Hippocrates. Can you talk a little bit more about the transmission of these manuscripts and how they would have both Christianized them, you know? They're trying in a lot of ways, I mean, we see this ultimately with like Aquinas, right, like
He's synthesizing Aristotle, famously, but we see the same thing here. What does that look like for them to Christianize these classical sources and to contextualize their Christian sources?
Meg Leja (28:02.41)
Well, I think we need to, I mean, we need to return here to a point you made just a few minutes ago where you're talking about kind of, you know, the inheritance of the classical tradition and you were also talking about these other big moments, right, you know, the rise of universities, the Renaissance, the Reformation. I mean, all of these are kind of recognized more prominently as moments in history where, you know, kind of big ideas, yeah, you know, come into being or institutions that play out to our modern day, but.
You know, the Carolingians are kind of those forgotten, like silent little mice. I don't know. I don't know what the right metaphor is here. But they, you know, we don't talk about this period as equal in moment to these other periods, but really, and this is not to get into, you know, the Carolingians had a Renaissance too, but it is to think about them as a really, really important kind of moment of blockage, right? A bottleneck, or the Carolingians as gatekeepers, which I, you know, call them.
A lot of what we think about, a lot of what we know about the classical world, right, the supposed like great moment in human history, right, that set the course for so much of our thinking about democracy and medicine and politics, you know, we wouldn't know about that if it weren't for the silent Carolingians, right? They are busy anonymously. You know, we don't have...
names often. We don't have people like Thomas Aquinas, like big figures, but we have these monks kind of silently copying away these texts. And that includes religious texts, so texts by church fathers like Augustine, you know, Jerome, I mean all of these really important thinkers in late antiquity, you know, it includes earlier Christian texts, but it also includes, you know, pagan classical texts, so works by Hippocrates, right, Virgil.
You know, I mean, and he never like works by when I mentioned the biography of Charlemagne, right? This is modeled on Suetonius's lives of the Caesars, right? So we have you know, all of these this really important corpus of literature that the Carolingians preserve Right and so many as I referenced earlier many of the first witnesses to text our ninth century manuscripts so we cannot think of
Meg Leja (30:23.218)
our knowledge about the past without thinking about the Carolingians. And we cannot go forward, you know, into the 12th century and the Renaissance without thinking about this kind of foundation of texts and traditions that the Carolingians synthesized. And you talked about synthesis, right? They bring it together. So what, so in terms of medicine, say, what does that look like? We have these ninth century, you know, a bunch, hundreds more than we had previously thought hundreds of ninth century manuscripts.
that are either full of different medical texts or have like a section devoted to medicine or sometimes medicine is even in the margins like different remedies just scribbled in the corners. But a lot, you know, an indication that medicine is being thought of as discrete genre, right? As we would recognize it to be like a whole book about, you know, great, these are different cures for the body. This is how the body works. This is how the physician should behave. That's a kind of standard book of medicine in the ninth century.
And these have been collected by the Carolingians. They might have even scoured different libraries in Italy or gotten texts from Spain to preserve, out of an interest, like, let's see what the past has to offer us and let's investigate it and let's copy it. We can turn it to a good use. Even if it was written by pagans, we can put it, we can convert it to Christian ends.
And so your final question, what does it look to Christianize these texts? Well, visually, right? We don't have tons of images, but what I try to draw attention to is the images that we've got are like pretty powerful images on the page of this random medical book. So we have a text on bloodletting. It's not even a very, it's not like.
particularly beautiful text. This isn't, you know, a gospel book, it's not ordained with, or illuminated with gold or purple or anything. But right next to this bloodletting text, we've got a figure of, you know, Christ on the cross, you know, with like blood on his face, you know, clearly kind of alluding to the blood of the bloodletting text, you know, and this is, and at the top, you know, we've got a mention of in the title, the Holy art of medicine. So.
Meg Leja (32:38.602)
you know, what is this text doing? It is clearly doing something new and very interesting, right, trying to draw associations between the work of the doctor in bringing forth blood from the human body and, you know, Christ's role on the cross, you know, in terms of redeeming humanity, in terms of, you know, bringing health to the human condition, you know, through his blood. So lots of really interesting messages. We've got the illuminations on the page. We have lots of different, like,
little snippets like, all men, and thanks be to God, we have this text. Those are working to Christianize this otherwise pagan work. And then we can reference what I said earlier about the doctor, right? We see the role of the healer as emerging as a particularly Christian role, right? Someone who, like the saints, can intervene in the health of the body, who has a kind of channel to God. God works through the healer in either bringing health or not.
So there's a multitude of different ways in which these texts are being Christianized, references to the Bible, trying to kind of trawl through the Bible and make arguments about all the times that medicine is mentioned and how this is a clear sign that God wanted us to study it and collecting those together and then putting them as a preface to this medical book. Does that begin to answer?
PJ (33:57.613)
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, you have this need, right? Like, they're like, we need medicine. And, and then they find arguments in Christianity to create this office of doctor that is sanctified so that it's like, it has proper authority and it fits within the functioning body and soul of the empire. Am I tracking with you? Okay.
Meg Leja (34:19.826)
Exactly. Yeah. And you know, I think that, you know, that's what's important to point out is just that they have I mean, there is medicine in the Merovingian period, like, it's not like people are like, oh, you lost your leg, too bad. You know, there's probably surgery on the battlefield. We don't know that much about it because we have even fewer sources from the Merovingian period. But people are practicing medicine. There are healers, right? People who would have been recognized as doctors.
PJ (34:34.958)
Hahahaha
Meg Leja (34:48.162)
But what's new in the ninth century is that we have an attempt to justify, right? To explain, to legitimize what had already been going on. So to be more self-conscious about it, right? And this relates to what we were talking about earlier where the Carolingians take over from the Merovingians and need to justify, like, why do we have the right to rule? So we have this whole kind of reform movement that goes, I don't know, back to basics, but, you know, is really trying to think through, like, why do we do the things that we do? And is that okay?
Right? Like should we be doing this? And that's what we see with medicine, right? Like people are suffering. What is the response? Should we just, you know, care for them? Are we thinking about like palliative care here where we, you know, attempt to make them comfortable, but we don't intervene too much because that's, you know, the domain of God, right? It's his decision and humans should just kind of sit back and, you know, like watch and observe. Should we bring them to the saints because those are the legitimate healers, right? Like should they go to the relics and pray?
Or should we take this herb, mash it, mix it, distribute it over days with wine? Should we make predictions about whether this person will be healed or not? All of these kinds of questions are now up for debate, or they take on a new significance.
PJ (36:07.573)
And I think there's a question and historiography to me is always really fascinating. This idea of like big history, like what we accept as a culture. And one of the things that's interesting, even as you're talking about this, the big ideas, the big moments in history, part of the reason that we think of it like that is because we want this really big, simple narrative. And we kind of need that to even understand what's going on, right? When you...
you know, not you, right? Like you spent your whole life working on this, right? But like for the everyday person on the street, like then there was the dark ages and I think there's like the Renaissance, I don't know. You know, and one of the things that's interesting about this, I think part of the reason, I'm curious, you mentioned, I think for a lot of people, hundreds of manuscripts, you know, like that's way more than we thought and that's actually a lot. And I think a lot of people are like, that doesn't seem like a lot. And it's like, there was no printing press, right? There's no printing press.
Meg Leja (36:35.852)
Thank you.
Meg Leja (37:01.386)
Thank you.
PJ (37:02.565)
That meant that those all got hand copied and they survived. That's crazy, right? Like that's a lot of work. Yeah.
Meg Leja (37:09.942)
It is. It is. But I laugh at work because this is such a, this is like a marital conversation because my husband works on the 19th century. He's a historian of the 19th century. And so when I mention the number of sources I have, I'm like, whoa, I've discovered all these sources. He's like, what's wrong with you? That's not fair. But you got to work with what you've got. And that's why, you know, I think medievalists are just so great.
PJ (37:27.73)
Yeah.
Meg Leja (37:37.15)
at really getting into the nugget, talking about historical, how do we read text? How do we understand what authors are doing? What is the function of the text? How was it copied? How was it transmitted? What was the dynamic between the author and the audience? We can ask those questions and we can do that really thorough analysis really well as medievalists because we have to pay so close attention to what each text is doing.
PJ (37:39.789)
Yeah.
PJ (37:45.925)
Yes.
PJ (37:59.669)
Yeah, that's funny. That's a whole nother conversation. I would just love to know what like, nevermind. That's more personal. That's so funny that you've, that the two of you got married and you're like, I could just see the interdepartmental debates, you know, anyways. Another thing, and this is something that you kind of mentioned, they do it anonymously. They're the silent Carolingians you mentioned. Do you think part of the reason that they
I will say suffer, or at least they get kind of closed off in the big story, is because the lack of author attribution. And so you don't have these names that like, oh, it's like, well, that's Aquinas, right? Like you have Peter Lombard, you have Calvin, you have Luther fighting with Tetzel. You have these people like characters. And no matter what synthesis is happening, you're like...
Meg Leja (38:51.563)
Yes.
PJ (38:54.641)
And it was nameless monk number 50. You know, like that just doesn't have the same.
Meg Leja (39:00.955)
That's actually a really good idea. I might have to borrow that in the future. Yeah, I think... No, you are so correct. There are so many things to be said about this. I mean, first, you know, the point that you made about narrative. I mean, we all need narrative to understand the past, but, you know, the Dark Ages, we need to think about the role that is always fulfilling for us in terms of narrative. How do you have a Renaissance? How do you have a moment...
PJ (39:06.521)
This monk will call Fred. Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
Meg Leja (39:26.934)
you know, where, you know, these peaks, right? How do you have these more important moments of human history if before that, you don't have something that is problematic, right? And so the dark ages really fulfills for us that moment. I mean, it's obvious, right? Dark versus light. I mean, you know, decline versus progress. You know, if it fills for us and it continues, right? Even as we kind of chip away, right? It used to be the whole middle ages from like 400 to 1400, then, you know, the later middle ages from, you know, 1200, 1400, that started to look better, but you know.
And we still got the early middle ages. You know, these moments persist as ways for us to create that narrative flow that we need, right? First there was Greece and Rome, then things really declined, then we managed to get out of the mud, right? I mean, it just, yeah. So we always need to be conscious of the fact that we need stories, but that how do we construct these stories? And you know, what are we utilizing to do that? Especially, you know.
As an early medievalist, I'm very attuned to this. So there's that. And then as you say, right, the anonymity. We don't like anonymity, right? We want to have names. We want to have figures. And for the Carolingian period, you know, as I said, you know, we have this host of characters at the court, but medicine, you know, that just doesn't, it doesn't fit in. Cause most of these texts, they're very hard to situate. We don't know who copied them. We can't be sure often where they were copied.
you know, were some of these texts written before and then just preserved by the Carolingians, or were they written anew in the ninth century? And there's so much, I mean, we're not gonna get into this, but like, man, I cannot tell you, just the debate about this stuff gets really intense. It can sometimes get a little bit vicious even, because people really won't argue, you know, this was the fifth century, this was the sixth century, no, it was the eighth century, no, it was the ninth century. And you know, I engage in that to some extent, obviously, but you know, my point is kind of...
Ultimately, it was copied in the ninth century. Manuscripts, sheet, those things are expensive. Labor, ink, I mean, this is, when you're copying a medical text, you're deciding to put resources into that field, right, into that genre. So, we have to appreciate that the copying of these texts means something significant in the ninth century by whoever did it, wherever they did it, for whatever audience.
Meg Leja (41:49.134)
And you know, I hope that as time goes on and as more people are working on this field, we'll begin to map out some of these relationships a bit better. I don't know that we're ever going to get to authorship. But, you know, we need to be able to grapple with, yeah, you know, anonymous monk number 50, right? We need to appreciate those invisible actors in history. And there's been a lot of work in other periods to, you know, bring voices to silenced peoples. And, you know, I'm not, you know,
trying to necessarily make similar claims for Carolingian monks, but you know, these are silent actors who deserve some recognition for the fact that, you know, they spent these hours uncomfortably as, you know, monks complain about like cold, like with my cramped hand, like bent over copying out these works. It's not, it's not easy. So, you know, thanks and all this month.
PJ (42:36.589)
Yeah. Yes, exactly. No, that's I, yeah, my, my background's in philosophical hermeneutics. Um, and one of the things I covered, especially like on the religious side is, uh, textual transmission, right? And you just look at it like, uh, especially like the, the most copied book of course is the Bible. And so when people hear like, I think it's like, Oh, I'm going to get it wrong. It's either 500 or 900. Like
Thousand different variations in text of the Bible people are like well. We can't be a Trustworthy copy then it's like okay before you like let's remember that these are hand copied Often by like 15 year olds who are like listening to some guy read it off. It's like there's a lot of misspellings Okay, that's like that's like 95% of them like and you're like when you start to think about that When you start to think about like literally we
If you get a book, that meant someone sat there and wrote... Like, I've never written a whole book in my life. The idea that you just sat for hours every day just writing, um, especially... Anyways, it's a funny mental image to me, yeah.
Meg Leja (43:43.99)
Yeah.
Meg Leja (43:47.55)
Yeah, it's a whole, well, it's a whole mental, of mental, it's a whole physical labor that, you know, we're just not really, yeah, I mean, we're so distanced from that. And you know, you talked about our period of history moving more quickly, but yeah, I mean, you know, when I was growing up, I mean, I didn't have a family computer until I was, you know, in high school. And, you know, I mean, I wrote most of my essays by hand. That alone feels so distant to me now.
Right? So I mean, it's very hard for students at the moment, you know, in my classes to really engage with what, you know, yeah, what that transmission process looks like. And, you know, it's very hard to grapple with the fact that, yeah, you know, we can have odd text, but in fact, each version is slightly different. And what we see with medical texts in particular, like, oh, don't get, I mean, compared to the Bible, like we're talking just huge differentiation. I mean, radically different, you know, like.
PJ (44:39.965)
Oh yeah.
Meg Leja (44:44.31)
But it's such a mess. Oh man, I just like, when I was doing my dissertation, this is enough to drive you crazy. I mean, you've got like the title of a text and this title is similar. The text is totally different or the same text, totally different titles. I mean, this chunk, that chunk mixed together, inter-spliced. I mean, it's a mess. So, you know, working with these things, when the classicist said, you know, the dark ages, like these are corrupt Latin texts.
PJ (44:46.554)
Hahaha!
Meg Leja (45:13.202)
They were wrong, right? This was too much of a judgment, but it's true that they are very messy and they are very, very difficult to work with. So, you know, that's a hard kind of barrier to overcome if you wanna work on Carolingian medicine, for sure.
PJ (45:29.093)
So, and I mean, you don't mess with the Bible, right? Like, because those are God's words. But as you're talking about, obviously some of this is the corruption of texts, but a lot of it is actually the work of synthesis. And we see it as corruption because it's not attributed to an author, right?
Meg Leja (45:32.711)
Not.
Meg Leja (45:45.642)
Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, corruption here, I mean, there's corruption, if we wanna use the term corruption, that's just a mistake in copying for sure. But how do you, I mean, sometimes it's clearly a mistake. I mean, sometimes this is a very active choice, right? Like I will not copy out this line, or I think this word makes much more sense as this word, and I better change it. So yeah, I mean, there's this whole creative activity that is going on, and that's to return to the images, right? Even just thinking about.
Like how will I frame this text? How will I set up this page? These are all choices and we have to recognize, or we have to recognize, but we also, if we're looking for evidence, we have to try to read back through what remains to get at what kind of a choice was this? In a context in which there weren't manuscripts of medicine with Christ's face covered in blood on them, like what did it mean to copy this text with this image next to it? That's a big deal.
and what kind of debates, what kind of discussions must have been taking place within the society to produce this end result. So a lot of it's kind of reading back through the manuscript evidence to try to get at what kind of conversations were people having about medicine, were some people saying we really ought not to do this, this is dangerous, this is going to bring us into trouble, this is not the path to salvation as we've been talking about, danger, danger.
you know, against other people who are really saying, no, look, right? I mean, here's the natural world. There are all these trees or all these shrubs. Like, God made all of these things, and he wants us, right, to use our wisdom. You know, we are rational beings. The soul is an image of God in its reason, and we should use that reason to govern the body, right? To not do so would, in fact, be an offense in some ways, too.
to the divine plan.
PJ (47:44.757)
I want to come back to something you said earlier where you were talking about, like, you remember getting your first family computer, I remember getting my first family computer, and it's astonishing, my son is, my oldest son is eight years old, and he will never remember a time where he could not talk to Google. And that is, that is mind blowing to me.
Meg Leja (48:03.55)
Yeah, I know.
PJ (48:07.077)
You know, I mean, like, he will never remember a time when there weren't smartphones. He won't remember a time when there wasn't social media. And that's only 10 years back, right, that actually started. And that has radically transformed our world. But what I... Go ahead.
Meg Leja (48:10.199)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Meg Leja (48:17.802)
It has, yeah, no, sorry. I mean, I don't mean to draw self-contagence, but it's so obvious. I mean, I have to say, so this is my second, third week of classes. And I noticed that even, you know, just when I started teaching students during the break in my seminar, they would talk to one another. Now, they're just all, you know, they're all on their phones. It's just a totally different way of engaging with time and with the self, with other people. I mean,
You know, so it's really things change very, very quickly. And, you know, we don't notice a lot of that change, in the moment, right? It kind of passes us by.
PJ (48:58.929)
I, what, and though, why, this isn't just me just reminiscing, you know, just like, back in my day. Um, but the, what I, uh, what I appreciate about the work that you're doing is that it gives us access to other modes of existence. And that's really like what I, what I wanted to highlight here is that like, uh, and this is kind of mind boggling as well is that, uh, if we don't have your work, we don't really think about, uh, a world.
Meg Leja (49:17.646)
Yeah.
PJ (49:28.889)
without a printing press, right? And even that greatly, I mean, even as we talk about the number of sources and the way that the author becomes more important because of the way things spread, like if you only have one book, it's like, well, Johnny copied that, because it's like, it's the one of like three books, you know, like. And as we talk about this, I think it's, part of what history gives us is, oh, you know what? You don't actually have to, I mean, I've thought about this a lot as the internet.
has made copyright very awkward. It's like, what about a model of life that doesn't have author attribution? Do we have to have that? Do we need to be on our phones? Do we need to, you know, do we need to have this more global network? And these aren't, I'm not saying that any of this stuff is necessarily bad or the right way to go, but it gives us access to, by digging further in the past, we actually get access for creativity for the future.
Meg Leja (50:27.67)
Oh yes, thank you. That was so, I mean, it's, yes, I mean, this is, you know, I don't really care that my students leave knowing anything about the Carolingians, about the history of pre-modern medicine. I so much care that they understand the benefit that the study of history brings to our society, right? I mean, fundamentally, this is a discipline in which we are alienated from ourselves in many ways, right?
like everything that we think about our world is kind of thrown into relief and we are supposed to be shocked that we have these common sense assumptions, right? I mean, and again, this isn't a judgment. It's not good or bad. It's just to have that self-conscious reflection, right? To kind of perform, as we've been talking about this disjunction between the Merovingians and the Carolingians, you know, everything that's kind of, well, we have to rethink, we have to question, right? What is this correct? And
you know, we should be doing that as members of a productive society, as a healthy society, we should be always thinking, you know, what are these things we take for granted? You know, and, you know, are there other options? So, yes, I mean, it's alienation from the self, it's empathy for other cultures, other peoples, like it's humility in the face of this long span of, you know, human time where humans did things in different ways and, you know, recognizing that we think we have the answers, but that the future might look at us and think of God more than doing.
PJ (51:46.775)
Yeah
Meg Leja (51:49.442)
So, I mean, you know, these are very important skills to develop and it is about, yeah, I mean, ultimately it's about our own creativity, our own intellectual flexibility. And that's what I really think also about the study of pre-modern, you know, for thinking about pre-modern medicine. You know, it shouldn't be a kind of side note to, this is going to sound self-interested, but it shouldn't be a side note to, you know, becoming a doctor.
I mean, if you think about the way that we want to train doctors now, and I feel like there's been some more recognition that the humanities are important, that we don't want kind of people who just have facts but don't know how to engage as human beings. But really, I think ultimately we haven't seen a major shift in terms of how we understand training or how we understand preparation or what the kind of course to a medical degree should look like.
Maybe it's great if they came in with the humanities, or maybe it's great if we include some of this more patient-centered care, but that, it's, you know, the bedrock of what medical training looks like hasn't really been questioned. And, you know, I really think there's more room for, yeah, you know, using the humanities, using history to really think about, you know, how do we understand the body, right? How do we approach care? You know, what about fundamental relationships between, you know,
like religion and medicine and it's not arguing for particular religious tradition, but to think about, you know, the role that kind of spirituality might play, you know, in healing, you know, whether that's just, you know, to provide comfort or, you know, really, you know, as a, you know, we're thinking about the placebo effect and, you know, neuroplasticity, the way the brain, I mean, there's all kinds of questions about, you know, how these kinds of
you know, the emotions of the patient, you know, the relationship between the doctor and the patient, how these can actually affect treatment. So, I don't know, what am I saying? To, you know, I think there's room for a greater revolution in terms of, you know, humanistic, like philosophy, history, you know, religious studies, like in terms of thinking about how we approach the care of the body and disease, right, health.
PJ (53:52.825)
No, no, it's amazing.
Meg Leja (54:10.882)
big, big questions as to your podcast.
PJ (54:12.717)
Yeah. There you go. Yeah. No. And that's why, that's why I wanted to have you on today. I, um, normally I would end by asking, um, what's something to leave our audience with, but I can't think of a better way to end than with that very, uh, eloquent speech you just gave us. And so I, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on today. It has been a real joy.
Meg Leja (54:36.81)
No, thank you. It's been a pleasure. And you know, there's nothing nicer than having someone else make the arguments. The study of history is so important.
PJ (54:47.254)
Absolutely.