Hippocrates the fool : faith and healing in Lovelich’s History of the Holy Grail

• Main Author: Hindley, Katherine Storm
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English; Old English; Henry Lovelich
• Online Access: http://www.movingworlds.net/volumes/19/literature-medicine-health/; https://hdl.handle.net/10356/143602
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

‘[A]s a literary monument, or as a work of art, his History of the Holy Grail is valueless’, wrote Dorothy Kempe, one of the early-twentieth-century editors of the works of Henry Lovelich. Other critics describe Lovelich as ‘the most clumsy and tedious poet of the fifteenth century’, and as ‘an unimaginative and insensitive clod’. The History of the Holy Grail, meanwhile, has been dismissed as a mere translation into English of the French Estoire del Saint Graal ‘without any additions or alterations whatsoever’, evidence only of the fact that Lovelich ‘felt unfulfilled by his trade as a furrier.’ It is only relatively recently that some scholars, including Roger Dalrymple and Raluca Radulescu, have started to identify elements of originality within his verse. In this article, I aim to show that far from slavishly following his French source, Lovelich made significant, systematic changes that profoundly alter the text’s approach to ideas of faith and healing. To do this I focus on just one short section of the History of the Holy Grail: the chapter dealing with the life and shameful death of the great physician Hippocrates, widely known in medieval England as Ypocras.