Medicine in Oxford and Cambridge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is ripe for reappraisal. It is thirty-three years since Faye Getz contributed a magisterial overview to the second volume of the History of the University of Oxford. (There is no comparable chapter for Cambridge.) In recent decades much new work has been done on scholars and fellows with medical interests, on medical books in library catalogues, and on the surviving manuscripts. Building outwards from my own work for the ‘official’ history of one middle-ranking, partly medical, medieval college, All Souls, I shall try to gather the fruits of some of this work. The two universities’ medical faculties have sometimes been seen as backwaters waiting the dawn of the Renaissance to relieve them from stagnation – waiting, as it might be, for Linacre. Instead, we should ask why there was any medicine at all in colleges dominated by theologians and lawyers, and we should tease out the various purposes university medical learning could serve.

Peregrine Horden, a former research associate of the Wellcome Unit, is Fellow Librarian of All Souls College, and Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, Royal Holloway University of London. He works on environmental history and the history of medicine in the Middle Ages. Recent publications include Il mare che corrompe (2024), a revised and updated edition of his earlier book, The Corrupting Sea, co-author Nicholas Purcell, and his single-authored Cultures of Healing, Medieval and After (2020).