14 - Medicine in the Court of the Avignon Papacy

Summary

This chapter examines the relationship between medicine and the papacy in the Middle Ages. It considers the historiographical debate amongst historians regarding whether popes were primarily adversaries to or advocates of the study and evolution of medicine. Focusing on the Avignon popes and their courts, it suggests that these individuals and their spaces increasingly became cultural centres for the production, transmission, and consumption of medical ideas and practices throughout the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With the rise of medicine as a profession – and the sociocultural value this process bestowed on its practice – a pope’s patronage of medical activities granted prestige both to his court and to his beneficiaries.