Spiritual Health and Crusading: Aspects of Preventative Health Care in the Thirteenth Century

Abstract

This article explores the nature of ‘spiritual health’ as an important aspect of medieval preventative healthcare. Focusing on prescriptive and practical advice to crusaders and pilgrims, including the understudied thirteenth-century Regimen iter agentium vel peregrinantium of Adam of Cremona, composed for the Emperor Frederick II, the article argues that mobile populations like crusaders were well-informed about the holistic nature of health. It demonstrates that spiritual and physical health were aligned in medieval medical theory, and together shed important light on the nature of preventative healthcare among medieval mobile populations.