"The medieval English hospital held a mirror to society, reflecting its preoccupations and anxieties, not only about charity and health in this world, but salvation in the next. Hundreds of hospitals for the sick poor were founded in England before the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, and pious benefactors made massive investments in them. Yet their changing functions - at both a practical and a spiritual level - have often been misunderstood, and historians have only recently begun to appreciate their relevance as a wider topic of study." "Thanks to the survival of a unique combination of documentary and architectural evidence, illustrated in this volume, it is possible to produce an indepth assessment of one specific institution - St. Giles's Hospital, Norwich - set firmly in a broader historical context. Carole Rawcliffe has studied the remarkable medieval archive relating to the hospital and the fruits of this research provide a surprising new insight into a subject that is now regarded as crucial to our understanding of past society. Questions about social and economic change, the response to heresy, the importance of political patronage and the impact of the Reformation are answered, providing a case study of medieval hospital life, and a history in microcosm of England in the late Middle Ages."--BOOK JACKET.