Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 118

GRIPLA116
particularly humoral theory,5 and the degree to which such theories inter-
sected with or influenced medieval Icelandic conceptions of body, emotion
and wellbeing.6 A thread common to these growing areas of research is
the relationship between humans and the social and material world: how
physical and cognitive health, though rooted in the body, is not necessarily
conceptually bounded by this body. This aligns with recent research into
concepts of body and personhood in the medieval North by Kirsi Kanerva
and Miriam Mayburd, who argue that the human body was understood to
be porous and “open” to the physical environment.7
5 Humoral theory was the dominant model of medieval physiology, deriving from the
Greek physicians Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) and Galen (129–c. 200CE). This theory
envisages not only a mind–body continuum (in which both physical and mental health
were contingent on maintaining a balance of the four humours) but also a body–world
continuum: each of the four humours comprising humans’ physical and cognitive natures
(blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) were composed of the same properties as the
four elements of which the world was made (Miranda Anderson, “Distributed Cognition
in Medieval and Renaissance Studies,” Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance
Culture, ed. by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2019), 24). Humours were thought to be influenced by a wide range
of external stimuli, from planets to daydreams (Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects:
Bodies, Medicine and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 26). An imbalance between the four humours
was considered the cause of ill physical and psychological health and could be managed by
regulating intake of foods and medicines and the excretion of bodily substances (Brynja
Þorgeirsdóttir, “Emotions in Njáls saga and Egils saga: Approaches and Literary Analysis”
(PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2020): 63).
6 Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, “Humoral Theory in the Medieval North: An Old Norse Translation
of Epistula Vindiciani in Hauksbók,” Gripla 29 (2018): 35–66; Yoav Tirosh, “Milk,
Masculinity, and Humor-Less Vikings – Gender in the Old Norse Polysystem,” Limes
13 (2020): 136–50; Colin Mackenzie, “Vernacular Psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic
and Old English” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2014): 128–43; Kirsi Kanerva,
“Porous Bodies, Porous Minds. Emotions and the Supernatural in the Íslendingasögur (ca.
1200–1400)” (PhD diss., University of Turku, 2015): 111–13. Direct evidence of familiarity
with humoral theory in Iceland comes from medical treatises which offer humoral cures
and which outline the operation of the humoral system (e.g., AM 655 XXX 4to (13th c.) and
Hauksbók (14th c.)).
7 While Mayburd explores the open body schema in terms of the perceived effects personal
objects (and specifically swords) had upon their users in saga literature (“Objects and
Agency in the Medieval North: The Case of Old Norse Magic Swords,” Sredniowiecze
Polskie i Powzechne T.12 (2020): 42–68), Kanerva examines the effects contact with the
undead have on the mental and physical health of the living (“Disturbances of the Mind
and Body: Effects of the Living Dead in Medieval Iceland,” Mental (Dis)Order in Later
Medieval Europe, ed. by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen, Later Medieval
Europe 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 219–42). Also relevant here are several archaeological