New book – The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity, by Jessica L. Wright, pub. by University of California Press

About the Book

New book – Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World, Perspectives from across the Mediterranean and Beyond, Edited by Lori Jones and Nükhet Varlık for Boydell & Breyer

DESCRIPTION

This collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease, across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions.

Across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions shared inherited medical paradigms containing similar healthy living precepts and attitudes toward body, illness and mortality. Yet, as the chapters collected here demonstrate, customs of diagnosing, explaining and coping with disease and death often diverged with respect to knowledge and practice.
Offering a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad selection of material emerging from England to the Persian Gulf, the volume reaches across conventional disciplinary and historiographical boundaries. Plague diagnoses in pre-Black Death Arabic medical texts, rare, illustrated phlebotomy instructions for plague patients, and a Jewish plague tract utilising the Torah as medicine reflect critical re-examinations of primary sources long thought to have nothing new to offer. Novel re-interpretations of Giovanni Villani’s “New Chronicle”, canonisation inquests and saints’ lives offer fresh considerations of medieval constructions of epidemics, disabilities, and the interplay between secular and spiritual healing. Cross-disciplinary perspectives recast late medieval post-mortem diagnoses in Milan as a juridical – rather than strictly medical – practice, highlight the aural performativity of the Franciscan deathbed liturgy, explore the long evolution of lapidary treatments for paediatric and obstetric diseases and thrust us into the Ottoman polychromatic sensory world of disease and death. Finally, considerations of the contributions of modern science alongside historical primary sources generates important new ways to understand death and disease in the past. Overall, the contributions juxtapose and interlace similarities and differences in their local and historical contexts, while highlighting and nuancing some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease – two historiographical subfields long approached separately.

Content

 
Intersections: Disease and Death, Medicine and Religion, Medieval and Early Modern
LORI JONES, NÜKHET VARLIK AND WINSTON BLACK

PART I: DIAGNOSING, EXPLAINING AND RECORDING

1 Knowing the Signs of Disease: Plague in the Arabic Medical Commentaries between the First and Second Pandemics
NAHYAN FANCY

2 The Legal Foundations of Post-Mortem Diagnosis in Later Medieval Milan
ANN G. CARMICHAEL

3 Epidemic Illness in the Last Book of Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle, 1345-1348: Warfare, Sin and the Heavens
NICOLE ARCHAMBEAU

4 Colours of Disease and Death in the Early Modern Ottoman Cultural Imagination
NÜKHET VARLIK

PART II: COPING, PREVENTING AND HEALING

5 The Role of Music in a Franciscan Liturgy for the End of Life, as Evidenced in Manuscript Newberry 24
ELAINE STRATTON HILD

6 Medical and Spiritual Healing of Death and Disease in Medieval Miracle Stories
JENNIFER C. EDWARDS

7 Infirmity and Death-Wishes in Medieval French and Italian Canonisation Processes
JENNI KUULIALA

8 Bubo Men? Repurposing Medieval Anatomic Illustrations for Plague Therapy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
LORI JONES

9 Psalm 38 as Plague Diagnostic and Prophylactic in Abraham Yagel’s Moshi’ah Ḥosim (1587)
ANDREW BERNS

10 The Protection of Innocents: Red Coral as a Lapidary Cure for the ‘Children’s Disease’ and Conditions Related to Childbirth in Medieval and Early Modern England
NICHOLA E. HARRIS

PART III: STUDYING, ANALYSING AND INTERPRETING

11 Leprosy in Medieval Europe: An Immunological and Syndemic Approach
FABIAN CRESPO

12 Past Plagues: On the Synergies of Genetic and Historical Interpretations of Infectious Disease
HENDRIK POINAR

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
 

Authors

Lori Jones is a medical historian at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses primarily on plague texts and images.

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research focuses on disease, death, medicine and public health in the Ottoman Empire.

New book – Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity, by helen Rhee, pub. by Eerdmans 

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

Helen Rhee 

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Eerdmans (October 22, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 367 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802876846
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802876843

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study, Helen Rhee examines how early Christians viewed illness, pain, and health care and how their perspective was influenced both by Judeo-Christian tradition and by the milieu of the larger ancient world. Throughout her analysis, Rhee places the history of medicine, Greco-Roman literature, and ancient philosophy in constructive dialogue with early Christian literature to elucidate early Christians’ understanding, appropriation, and reformulation of Roman and Byzantine conceptions of health and wholeness from the second through the sixth centuries CE.

Utilizing the contemporary field of medical anthropology, Rhee engages illness, pain, and health care as sociocultural matters. Through this and other methodologies, she explores the theological meanings attributed to illness and pain; the religious status of those suffering from these and other afflictions; and the methods, systems, and rituals that Christian individuals, churches, and monasteries devised to care for those who suffered. Rhee’s findings ultimately provide an illuminating glimpse into how Christians began forming a distinct identity—both as part of and apart from their Greco-Roman world.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Health, Disease, and Illness in Greco-Roman Culture
2. Health, Disease, and Illness in the Bible and Early Christianity
3. Pain in Greco-Roman Culture and Early Christianity
4. Health Care in the Greco-Roman World
5. Health Care in Early Christianity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Indexes

 

More on the editor website: https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7684/illness-pain-and-health-care-in-early-christianity.aspx

CFP – IMC Leeds 2023 – Searching for Health and the Holy: Traces in Texts and Topography, org. by Ruth Salter, sponsor by The Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies

 

Sponsors: The Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, Department of History, University of Reading

Panel Abstract:

This/these panels seek to consider the ways in which connections could be built, and blurred, and what this meant in terms of understanding and experiencing the saintly and the prophetic. Abstracts are welcomed on any element that connects to health and/or the holy, including:

  • the spread and development of saints’ cults (textually, orally, culturally etc.)
    • pilgrimage and guidance for pilgrims/pilgrimage (especially in travel)
    • tracing signs/symbols of sanctity/pilgrimage through the landscape (e.g., in development of noble/religious networks)
    • journeys made by the saints themselves (real or meditative), and saintly networks/networking
  • networks of health and healthcare practice/belief good/bad omens in writing and in practice (e.g., brontology, astrology, medical etc.)
    • reading the signs of health and the search for ‘recovery’ (e.g., prognostics)
    • travel and trade in relation to health and medical practice monastic
    • hospitia (communal networks, locations on roads etc.)

If you would be interested in speaking on this panel/these panels, please email a short abstract (max. 200 words) and a brief biography to Ruth Salter (via r.j.salter@reading.ac.uk) no later than Friday 9 September (by the end of the working day).

New book – Disease and Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Art and Literature, ed. by Rinaldo Fernando Canalis & Massimo Ciavolella, pub. by Brepols 

SUMMARY

Humanity has always shown a keen interest in the pathological, ranging from a morbid fascination with ‘monsters’ and deformities to a genuine compassion for the ill and suffering. Medieval and early modern people were no exception, expressing their emotional response to disease in both literary works and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the plastic arts. Consequently, it becomes necessary to ask what motivated writers and artists to choose an illness or a disability and its physical and social consequences as subjects of aesthetic or intellectual expression. Were these works the result of an intrusion in their intent to faithfully reproduce nature, or do they reflect an intentional contrast against the pre-modern portrayal of spiritual ideals and, later, through the influence of the classics, the rediscovered importance and beauty of the human body?

The essays contained in this volume address these questions, albeit not always directly but, rather, through an analysis of the societal reactions to the threats and challenges that essentially unopposed disease and physical impairment presented. They cover a wide range of responses, variable, of course, according to the period under scrutiny, its technological moment, and the usually fruitless attempts at treatment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Introduction and Epidemiological Perspective

Rinaldo F. Canalis and Massimo Ciavolella

 

Part I. Medieval and Transitional Periods

The Art of Medicine in Byzantium: Disease and Disability in Byzantine Manuscripts

Alain Touwaide

Miracle and the Monstrous: Disability and Deviant Bodies in the Late Middle Ages

Jenni Kuuliala.

Leprosy, Melancholy, Folly and their Representations in French Medieval Literature

Gaia Gubini

Malady in Literary Texts from the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. Some Hypotheses on a Paradoxical Constellation

Joachim Küpper

Fevers, Botches and Carbuncles: Describing the Plague in Late Medieval and Early Modern Medical Treatises

Lori Jones

 

Part II. The Early Modern Period

The Role of Architecture and the Decorative Arts in Renaissance Medicine

Francis Wells

Art in Disease and Disease in Art: Reflections on Two Early Modern Paradigmatic Examples

Manuela Gallerani.

The Mal Franzoso: Between Art, History and Literature: Paracelso and Della Porta

Alfonso Paolella

The Ailing Artist

Roberto Fedi

Nicolas Poussin`s The Plague at Ashdod and the French Disease

Efrain Kristal

‘Yet have I in me something dangerous’: On the Interplay of Medicine and Maleficence in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Sara Frances Burdorff

Textures of Lesions – Textures of Prints

Domenico Bertoloni Meli

 

Index

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