Medieval Medicine and Marginalia: How Claire Burridge ’09 Found Her 'Recipe' for Fulfillment
By Dylan Howlett
6-minute read
Claire Burridge ’09 glanced from her teacher to the unblemished pages before her with some trepidation, as she recalls two decades later. She was new to Durham Academy as an Upper Schooler in Jordan Adair’s English class, and her pen quivered in her hand as she tried to reconcile her predilection for rule-following with Adair’s seemingly blasphemous suggestion. He wanted his students to write directly in their copies of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, a story of — among other themes — finding surprising resources in barren places. It was the only way, Adair said, for his students to engage with the written word, to fill the crevices and margins with scribblings of their own sense-making, their own decoding. It did little, at first, to soften Burridge’s disbelief. You’re not supposed to mark up books, she thought. What do you mean?
That is, naturally, the very question that she now confronts every day as she forages through the margins of Middle Aged texts. Burridge is a senior researcher of early medieval health and medicine at the University of Oslo, where she works on a team that is cataloguing previously undocumented notes found in the marginalia of manuscripts. Burridge serves as the team’s medical specialist and studies any fragments that contain a “recipe,” or prescription. It is a window into a medieval understanding of ailments and treatment, often scrawled in the once-overlooked margins that Burridge now scrutinizes. “It’s wild,” she says. “That’s discovery.”
Burridge’s career, too, was something of a discovery. She dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, which frequent visits to her extended family’s farm in the United Kingdom informed rather convincingly. Her father, Keith Burridge, and mother, Pat Saling — now both retired college professors — lauded their daughter’s expertise in lambs, snails, llamas and lemurs as part of their family’s senior yearbook tribute to Burridge, who also once held a summer job as a zookeeper. But her appreciation for history endured. Burridge completed an independent study about linguistics, dialect and etymology with Michael Ulku-Steiner, then the Upper School director. She became a history major at UNC-Chapel Hill after initially enrolling as a biochemistry major, and one of her professors recommended that she continue her history studies in graduate school. Burridge connected with a professor at the University of Cambridge, where she would eventually earn her Ph.D. and her master’s in medieval history. There was a manuscript, the professor said, that featured a collection of medical texts from around the year 800. It could benefit, the professor said, from closer inspection by a nascent researcher with dual interests in medicine and history. That was how Burridge discovered her recipe for a fulfilling career.
She published her first book — Carolingian Medical Knowledge and Practice, c. 775–900: New Approaches to Recipe Literature — in 2024. And her research has brought her to Norway, where both Burridge and her partner, Brad Jordan, are historians at the University of Oslo. They have embraced their adopted country with Norwegian aplomb: They are now proud owners of cross-country skis, and they attended the most recent world championships in team handball, one of Norway’s most beloved sports. “It’s spectacular,” Burridge says. “I can’t believe that I live here. I pinch myself.” Just as she does, at times, when she finds a kernel of medical knowledge etched into the margins by those brave enough to mark an unmarked page.
“It feels like being a detective every day,” Burridge said.
She spoke with the Durham Academy Marketing & Communications team in February as part of a wide-ranging interview about her insatiable love for research, her admiration for Norwegian life and her enduring connections to DA.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
DA: What is it about this particular project at the University of Oslo that satisfies your intellectual curiosity for medieval medicine?
Burridge: “This project is looking at all the stuff that doesn't relate to the main text — say, if you had a really medieval Bible, and then on the final blank page, someone reading it a generation after it was produced decided to write down a medical recipe. It usually hasn't been cataloged, right? So medical historians wouldn't know that there's this rogue recipe. They would never look at a Bible to find a recipe. So it's fascinating. It's really cool. Every day, I get to work with a legal collection or a Bible or even a collection of Virgil — something completely unrelated to what I do. And then there's a recipe in the corner, or something about bloodletting, or information about diet and the foods that you should eat to stay healthy, all sorts of stuff. Somebody was like, ‘Can't forget this!’ and jotted it down in the margins. It's wild.”
DA: Congratulations on publishing your first book in 2024. What was the process like?
Burridge: “At times, just not fun at all: very painful, a slog, never-ending. (Laughs) It came out of the Ph.D. because it’s sort of the goal to turn the Ph.D. into a book. The first thing is just to kind of set the Ph.D. down, not think about it too much and then to come back to it with slightly fresher eyes. I had to think about the fact that I wrote with really just my doctoral examiners in mind, but how do you turn it into something that might have a slightly wider audience? For me, the actual structure remained the same. If you were to compare even the chapter titles and the organization and everything, it would, at first glance, look identical to the Ph.D. But I think every single chapter has been extensively rewritten several times.”
DA: How did it feel to hold your book in your hands for the first time?
Burridge: “Shocking. I really couldn’t believe it.”
DA: What’s life like in Oslo?
Burridge: “It's spectacular. I can't really believe that I live here. Every day, I pinch myself. I live pretty much in downtown Oslo, and I can walk to work — and from here at the university, I could walk for another 30 minutes and be in the woods. If I have my cross-country skis with me, you could just hop on the equivalent of the Metro and end up on trails just like that. You're in the capital city of the country, and you have all the things that entails: great museums, culture, art. It's wonderful. And yet the woods are my backyard. In the winter, that's ski season. In summer, it's hiking. It’s light for so long that after work, I can just go for a hike for two, three hours, and it's still light. It's amazing.”
DA: You’ve remained close with some of your DA friends who have studied or lived in Europe. How have you stayed connected?
Burridge: “One of the things that I treasure about DA is the community that it fostered. I feel so lucky to have overlapped with some really wonderful, world-changing people. Yet having moved across the pond after undergrad, and not being on any social media, I also feel badly that I haven’t kept in better touch with many friends. Two exceptions, however, are Alex Box ’09 and Phoebe Oldach ’09, both of whom also ended up in the U.K. Remarkably, Phoebe and I started master of philosophy programs at Cambridge in the same year — 2014 — and were in the very same college, Sidney Sussex. After years running together, we both got into rowing and were a pair in Sidney’s women’s first VIII.
“The other exception is Alex, who is originally from the U.K. and moved back after also attending UNC-Chapel Hill. While I was at Cambridge, she was just an hour away in London, so we would link up fairly frequently — so much so that she became very good friends with some of my Cambridge friends, and we all still try to meet up together. Cambridge’s end-of-year parties — May Balls — are legendary. They’re generally black-tie affairs, or even white-tie, and quite a spectacle. Alex was able to come up for Sidney’s Ball several times.”
DA: You visited DA’s campus in January for the first time since you graduated. And while you were in town, you spent time with two of your favorite teachers: Dennis Cullen, your Upper School math teacher and coach in both cross-country and track, and Mr. Adair. What did they mean to you during your time as a student?
Burridge: “I'd say Mr. Cullen is another father figure for me. He was one of the best teachers I've ever had: I always found him so clear and so gifted at explaining math. Outside of the classroom, he was such a role model as a coach, the way that he knew everyone sort of inside and out. I'm sure he still does this, but he can recount people's individual times five years before, 10 years before, 25 years before. I can't remember my own time or my teammates’ times from those years. I don't know how he does it with that level of care and thoughtfulness and passion and drive.
“With Mr. Adair, I still use so many of the skills that he hammered in, and I passed those on to the students I taught during my fellowship at the University of Sheffield — whether it's highlighting in your actual book, or how to correct your writing, proofreading, reading your own work aloud. One of his rules was to circle all the times you've used variants of the verb “to be,” and it just shows you, ‘Oh, my God: This whole page is entirely passive. How do I make this much more active? How do I throw in different phrases and synonyms?’ I credit Mr. Adair so much: I think there’s always room to improve and to grow, and even acknowledging that comes from him.”
DA: You are a historian and aficionado of linguistics. What was the etymology, if you will, of your passion for history — and marginalia — while you were a student at DA?
Burridge: “I would say it was the culture of DA — of supporting curiosity and facilitating independent thought and research. I saw the latest [Upper School Curriculum Guide], and it’s just amazing. I think that DA was able to foster that type of creative thinking, but in an environment that also supports the rigor and the integrity of research — and provides students with general research skills.
“DA — on so many different levels — was foundational for pursuing more research, and wanting to learn everything I could.”