With so many people to thank, the only way I can conceive of beginning these acknowledgements is with the biggest and broadest of thank-yous: I wish to express a sincere thank you to everyone involved in the process of producing this book as well as to anyone who gives it a read and builds on this research in the future. And now on to a series of more specific thank-yous:
This book has emerged out of my PhD research at Cambridge. First and foremost, my heartfelt thanks go to Professor Rosamond McKitterick, who supervised my MPhil and PhD and has remained a wonderfully supportive mentor and source of guidance. The wider Cambridge academic community also helped to shape my research, not least by providing me with training in essential skills, from palaeography to palaeopathology. Within the Faculty of History as well as the Departments of Archaeology and asnc, I should especially like to thank Professor Lesley Abrams, Professor John Arnold, Dr Debby Banham, Dr Jenna Dittmar, Professor Caroline Goodson, Dr Susanne Hakenbeck, Dr Tom Lambert, Dr Piers Mitchell, Professor Tessa Webber, and Dr Neil Wright as well as the early medievalist students with whom I overlapped, including Dr Emma Brownlee, Dr Caitlin Ellis, Revd Dr Robert Evans, Dr Sam Leggett, Dr Eleni Leontidou, Dr Fraser McNair, Dr Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, and Dr Arthur Westwell. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to the Wellcome Trust for making this research possible via a Medical Humanities Doctoral Studentship [203431/Z/16/Z].
I feel incredibly fortunate to have received support and guidance from a host of colleagues and friends in the years since my PhD as I have continued to develop and refine my research. I am extraordinarily grateful to the British School at Rome for two years of postdoctoral fellowships during the first years of the Covid pandemic (as well as to Sidney Sussex College for providing an emergency refuge when I was temporarily repatriated to the UK in March 2020). The bsr community, including Dr Tom Brown, Professors Leslie Brubaker, Stephen Milner, John Osborne, and Chris Wickham, has strongly influenced my work. The Leverhulme Trust has since provided incredible support via an Early Career Fellowship at the University of Sheffield, and I have benefitted from sharing work with my medievalist colleagues, and especially my mentor Professor Charles West, as well as thinking across broader chronologies and geographies with the wide-ranging members of the Department of History, including Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock, Professor Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Dr Chris Millard, and Professor Phil Withington. The final stages of this book were completed after joining Professor Ildar Garipzanovâs MINiTEXTS
Beyond my own research homes, I am extremely grateful for my network of colleagues and academic friends around the world. In particular, Dr Jeffrey Doolittle, Dr Anna Dorofeeva, Professor Arsenio Ferraces RodrÃguez, Professor Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Professor Peregrine Horden, Dr Meg Leja, Dr Zubin Mistry, Professor James Palmer, Dr Raphaël Panhuysen, and Dr Carine van Rhijn each deserve a heartfelt thank you for their support, suggestions, and critiques. The ensuing book has benefitted immeasurably from their feedback, whether via discussions at conferences, over Zoom, or by email, and, of course, from their own extensive, path-breaking bodies of work. Likewise, I owe my thanks to the wider âmedmedâ community for sharing their resources and expertise spanning all areas of medieval medicine. In terms of conferences and workshops, I am grateful to have been able to share and discuss elements of the research underpinning the following chapters at Books and Bones (Cambridge), Categorising the Church ii (Poitiers), Collecting Knowledge, Creating Knowledge (Cambridge), the Graduate Early Medieval Seminar (Cambridge), the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), the International Medieval Congress (Leeds), the Medieval Archaeology Group (Cambridge), the Medieval History Research Seminar (Cambridge), and Wissen im Frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen). My thanks to all those involved, organisers and attendees, alike. I must also express an enormous debt of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers selected by Brill for their insightful comments and constructive feedback. All remaining errors are my own.
Numerous other institutions have been instrumental in making this research possible, and foremost among them are the libraries which today hold the manuscripts analysed throughout the following chapters. My thanks to the staff at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen for enabling me to work with their collections, and especially to the entire team at the Stiftsbibliothek for facilitating my several research stays and allowing me to reproduce images from multiple St. Galler manuscripts. Likewise, I should like to thank Claus Kropp and Dr Hermann Schefers for meeting with me in Lorsch (and later at the Books and Bones workshop in Cambridge) to discuss the excavations at Lorsch and their osteological collections as well as to permit me to use images of skeletal remains from their collections. My sincere thanks, too, to Dr Erik Goosmann of Mappa Mundi Cartography for creating the map seen in the opening pages. Finally, I must also extend an enormous thank you to the team at Brill, including the Nuncius Seriesâ editors, Professors Marco Beretta and Sven Dupré, as well as
My last round of thanks goes to my friends and family, without whom none of this would have been possible. I cannot begin to put my gratitude into words. As a small token of my thanks, this book is dedicated to my biggest supporters and greatest role models: my parents.