Medicine for the soul. The life, death and resurrection of an English medieval hospital: St Giles's, Norwich, c. 1249–1550

"Better far he had contented himself with amassing less and turning what he had got to account." So, prophetically for modern academics, wrote the posthumous editor of John Kirkpatrick, the eighteenth-century local antiquary. Kirkpatrick died before completing his history of the hospital of St Giles in Norwich. For her own magisterial study of that institution, Carole Rawcliffe has not only amassed a very great deal; she has written up her material elegantly and comprehensively; and she has published it all in time for the hospital's 750th anniversary celebrations. This hospital, founded by Walter Suffield soon after his consecration as bishop of Norwich in 1245, still functions on the site where it was first established, to the north east of the cathedral. It has been successively a hospital for sick paupers, an almshouse and secular college selling suffrage for the dead, a hospital again after the Reformation, and (its present function) a retirement home. Yet more remarkably, the archive of the Great Hospital (as it became known after the Reformation) survives in abundance, despite the Reformers' depredations and the library fire of 1994. Together with the records of the city and the cathedral priory, it furnishes the hospital historian with a rare opportunity. This opportunity Dr Rawcliffe has seized to the full. By tracing the evolution of the hospital between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, she has given us a "total history" which finds no parallel in the modern scholarship of English hospitals and few in that of European foundations. Specialists in different aspects of this totality will each find different things to praise: for example, the painstaking reconstruction of property and financial matters; the chapter on liturgy, enhanced by the unique survival of a diagrammatic processional in which the positions to be taken by tonsured priests are seemingly indicated by doughnuts; the prosopography of the hospital's masters, which undergirds a penetrating account of St Giles's place in local and national affairs; the detailed narration of Reformation manoeuvrings and of the emergence in Norwich of a "poor law" avant la lettre. The overall achievement is, however, greater than the sum of these local successes. First, as the title of the book indicates, medicina sacramentalis, medicine of the soul, is given its due as being absolutely central to the medieval hospital and as, potentially, no less therapeutic than its somatic counterpart. Second, the whole environment of the foundation, from its devotional imagery to its garden and its bedding, is viewed as contributing to the health of its inmates. On both counts, the contrast between the thirteenth-century hospital with its emphasis on nursing the elderly and the chronically sick, and the post-Reformation "God's House", with its salaried physician who might hope to return at least some of his charges to the city's workforce, is put into proper perspective. Third, St Giles is shown to refute the charges of universal mismanagement and corruption that have been levelled at later medieval hospitals more or less since the reign of Henry V. The transformation of hospital into chantry and almshouse is persuasively interpreted as an inevitable means of financial survival, and as by no means the abandonment of all charitable activity. Indeed, a fourth facet of Dr Rawcliffe's achievement is to have given us a view of medieval charity that is novel in its avoidance of implied value judgement. The support variously provided by St Giles