Word Eaters: Graphophagy in the Early and High Middle Ages

Syrups made from sacred words dissolved in water, cups with inscribed letters, and mysterious symbols traced on food—graphophagy, the ingestion of words, was real and widespread, yet scarcely studied within the medieval European context. This volume reveals how people consumed texts for therapeutic, ritual, and devotional purposes between late antiquity and the high Middle Ages. It explores remedies hidden in the margins of manuscripts, traces of ingestion in grimoires and medical texts, an...