Jordanus Ruffus and the late-medieval hippiatric tradition: Animal-care practitioners and the horse

This project looks at the development of horse-care in the late-medieval Latin West through the reception and context of one of its key texts: De medicina equorum by Jordanus Ruffus (d. 1256) a knight-farrier at the scientifically vibrant court of Frederick II (d. 1250) in Sicily. This thesis analyses the development and reception of hippiatric texts in Latin and various vernacular languages in the Latin West, contextualised via a large corpus of material linked to horse health and illness, which includes miracle narratives, guild records, chronicles, and muster rolls. This thesis is situated at the intersection of Animal Studies and the history of health and medicine. It places horse-care into a broader cultural context, arguing that literary, scientific, and theological ideas surrounding horses influenced the construction of horse-medicine. It argues that horse and human medicine were overlapping systems, broadly similar in form, method, and theory and that the only way to understand horse-medicine is within the context of ideas about both human and animal biology and health.
Chapters One and Two provide an overview of the historical, literary, and philosophical contexts of the hippiatric tradition, before charting the development and reception of these treatises. Chapter Three looks at the broad range of individuals and groups who provided daily care and interventionary medicine to horses in the Late Middle Ages. Chapter Four discusses the therapies available to medieval horse-carers, comparing the positions of magical and miraculous medicine and describing the dynamics of choice. Chapter Five uses an occupational health paradigm to discuss the construction and maintenance of elite horses by the hippiatric treatises. Finally, Chapter Six looks at ideas of agency, articulacy, and ‘violent care’ to consider the horse as a non-human patient.