Gordon, Stephen  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7778-2555
2026.
Health and the body: sleep regimens and sleep dysfunctions in Medieval European medicine.
A Cultural History of Sleep and Dreaming in the Middle Ages,
Vol. 2
Bloomsbury,
pp. 69-90.
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Abstract
The relationship between sleep and bodily health as understood in the European Middle Ages owes a huge debt to the corpus of humoural knowledge passed down from the Greek, Roman and Islamic worlds. The digestive theory of sleep popularised in Aristotle’s De somno et vigilia and Hippocratic-Galenic medicine had a profound influence on western medical writings into the Reformation and beyond. Regimen manuals such as the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (c.1150) and the hygiene section of the Pseudo-Aristotelian prose text, the Secretum Secretorum (c.1125), represented two of the main avenues by which easy-to-understand advice on how, when, and where to sleep was disseminated among lay readers. Alongside these dietary texts, herbals such as Pseudo-Macer Floridus’s De Viribus Herbarum (c.1000) and Mattheus Platearius’s Circa instans (c.1160) also contained valuable information on the humoural foundations of good sleep practice. With the tenets of humourism dictating that the ‘cooling’ of the body caused sleep and ‘heating’ caused wakefulness, herbals not only contain useful information on the types of cold substances that provoked sleep, but also the hot substances that worked best against chronic sleep disorders like the nightmare. Focusing on regimen texts and the traditions of materia medica, the aim of this chapter is to provide an insight into the strategies employed by physicians and non-physicians to manage the humoural rhythms of the body and ensure a healthful rest.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | In Press |
| Schools: | Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy |
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D111 Medieval History P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury |
| ISBN: | 9781350310001 |
| Date of Acceptance: | 30 October 2024 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Jun 2026 09:19 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187003 |
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