Jan of Jenštejn's De bono mortis: Reconstructing a Sceptical Patient's Travel Narrative.

While travelling across Europe, Jan of Jenštejn, archbishop of Prague (1379-96; d. 1400) suffered many illnesses. As recorded in his personal correspondence and the last work in his oeuvre, De bono mortis, Jenštejn frequently fell ill and encountered what he deemed to be incompetent physicians who were ignorant of how to treat his complexion. Coloured by these experiences, Jenštejn devoted a significant portion of his De bono mortis to criticising medicine and voicing his scepticism. He claimed to reject all forms of earthly medicine and placed his trust solely in frequent reception of the Eucharist as a sovereign treatment for spiritual and bodily health. As this article demonstrates, Jenštejn's narratives of illness not only reveal the rhetoric surrounding his medicalised sacramental theology, but also offer a means of conceptualising the ways in which travel complicated experiences of illness and treatment.