This presentation explores how medieval German healing charms encode ritual speech within manuscripts devoted to practical medicine. These charms are embedded in medical compendia alongside recipes, herbal lore, and therapeutic instructions, blurring any modern boundary between medicine, religion, and magic.

Drawing on two twelfth-century case studies -a veterinary charm preserved in the margins of a Latin medical treatise (Constantinus Africanus' Viaticus, Vatican City, Cod. pal. lat. 1158) and two blood-stanching charms annotated beside a herbal poem (Erfurt, CA 8° 062b) - my paper shows how orality is structurally built into these texts, whether signalled explicitly (a Latin rubric instructing the practitioner to say or sing the charm, occasionally accompanied by musical notation) or left unmarked yet equally assumed. Latin and German intermingle within single ritual sequences, biblical and apocryphal motifs (the Jordan's flow, Christ's wound, the Nativity) are woven into formulas addressed directly to the ailment, and material damage to the page requires philological reconstruction through comparison with parallel texts.

Reading these charms closely reveals not only how medieval scribes recorded a ritual meant to be spoken or sung, but also what such texts can tell us, more broadly, about the entanglement of healing, belief, and performance in medieval religious culture.