About Me

I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. I have been on a decade-plus long adventure of studying history after a short career as a pharmacist. Kids, a major home renovation and some time spent working retail all fit in there somewhere too.

As I started my history career, I tried to avoid the obvious topics in medieval history, but you cannot deny your own interests. After all, you don't go into something like pharmacy because you have no interest in science. And so like a siren, it called to me and here I am doing early medieval medicine focusing on recipes.

Now the obvious question is always about testing the recipes for efficacy and I always hesitate. What is efficacy? How do I measure success for a patient twelve-hundred years ago? I think their continued presence over millennia speaks to their perceived value and that should suffice to answer the efficacy question. What does interest me are the processes, doses, substitutions and variations in the recipes. What do these changes mean? Were different writers experimenting with the recipes? Did substitutions follow rules? Well we know that there were rules for substitutions, but how were new local plants transplanted into old recipes when no one had as yet assigned them their virtues? Did these introductions remain firm in their use, or did succeeding writers tweak where local plants fit? These are the sorts of questions I would like to answer.

These are also questions which move towards understanding the level of intellectual engagement there was with the medical theories available in Western Europe in the early medieval period. Often characterized as blighted, the period's texts do seem to favor the practical over the theoretical, but the theories pared down and simplified are still there. It is my goal to show that those theories were understood and were taken into consideration when changes to recipes were made.

It might mean cooking up a recipe or two, just to understand what they were trying to achieve. I will share here when I do. In the meantime, this blog will be where I put the funny/interesting/intriguing bits that fit nowhere else.

Nora B Thorburn
PhD Student,
Chair, Student Committee
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario
Canada