Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy

Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy PDF

Author: Patrick Outhwaite

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1914049268

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A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.

Sources for the History of Medicine in Late Medieval England

Sources for the History of Medicine in Late Medieval England PDF

Author: Carole Rawcliffe

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Published: 1996-05-01

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1580445160

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The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the inhabitants of late medieval England

Embodying the Soul

Embodying the Soul PDF

Author: Meg Leja

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0812298500

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Embodying the Soul explores the possibilities and limitations of human intervention in the body's health across the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Early medieval medicine has long been cast as a superstitious, degraded remnant of a vigorous, rational Greco-Roman tradition. Against such assumptions, Meg Leja argues that Carolingian scholars engaged in an active debate regarding the value of Hippocratic knowledge, a debate framed by the efforts to define Christian orthodoxy that were central to the reforms of Charlemagne and his successors. From a subject with pagan origins that had suspicious links with magic, medical knowledge gradually came to be classified as a sacred art. This development coincided with an intensifying belief that body and soul, the two components of individual identity, cultivated virtue not by waging combat against one another but by working together harmoniously. The book demonstrates that new discussions regarding the legitimacy of medical learning and the merits of good health encouraged a style of self-governance that left an enduring mark on medieval conceptions of individual responsibility. The chapters tackle questions about the soul's material occupation of the body, the spiritual meaning of illness, and the difficulty of diagnosing the ills of the internal bodily cavity. Combating the silence on "dark-age" medicine, Embodying the Soul uncovers new understandings of the physician, the popularity of preventative regimens, and the theological importance attached to dietary regulation and bloodletting. In presenting a cultural history of the body, the book considers a broad range of evidence: theological and pastoral treatises, monastic rules, court poetry, capitularies, hagiographies, biographies, and biblical exegesis. Most important, it offers a dynamic reinterpretation of the large numbers of medical manuscripts that survive from the ninth century but have rarely been the focus of historical study.

Essential Readings in Medicine and Religion

Essential Readings in Medicine and Religion PDF

Author: Gary B. Ferngren

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-09

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1421422905

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Ancient Near East -- Greece -- Rome -- Early Christianity -- The Middle Ages -- Islam / by M.A. Mujeeb Khan -- The early modern period -- The nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries

Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds PDF

Author: Darrel W. Amundsen

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13:

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In Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Darrel Amundsen explores the disputed boundaries of medicine and Christianity by focusing on the principle of the sanctity of human life, including the duty to treat or attempt to sustain the life of the ill. As he examines his themes and moves from text to context, Amundsen clarifies a number of Christian principles in relation to bioethical issues that are hotly debated today. In his examination of the moral stance of the earliest syphilographers, for example, he finds insights into the ethical issues surrounding the treatment of AIDS, which he believes has its closest historical antecedent not in plague but in syphilis. He also shows that the belief that all healing comes from God, whether directly, through prayer, or through the use of medicine -- a sentiment commonly held by contemporary Christians -- cannot be accurately attributed to any extant source from the patristic period. Indeed, all the Church Fathers were convinced that healing sometimes came from evil sources: Satan and his demons were able to heal, for example, and Asclepius was a demon "to be taken very seriously indeed."

Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages

Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Peter Biller

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1903153077

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Medicine and religion were intertwined in the middle ages; here are studies of specific instances. The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies. The book reflects the extraordinary advances which 'pure' history of medicine has made in the last twenty years: there is medicine at the levels of midwife and village practitioner, the sweep of the learned Greek and Latin tradition of over a millennium; there is control of midwifery by the priest, therapy through liturgy, medicine as an expression of religious life for heretics, medicine invading theologians' discussion of earthly paradise; and so on. Professor PETER BILLER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York; Dr JOSEPH ZIEGLER teaches in the Department of History at the University of Haifa.Contributors JOSEPH ZIEGLER, PEREGRINE HORDEN, KATHRYNTAGLIA, JESSALYN BIRD, PETER BILLER, DANIELLE JACQUART, MICHAEL McVAUGH, MAAIKE VAN DER LUGT, WILLIAM COURTENAY, VIVIAN NUTTON.

Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England

Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England PDF

Author: Carole Rawcliffe

Publisher: Alan Sutton Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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From a social context and using contemporary sources, this text explains how the medical profession (physicians, surgeons and apothecaries) developed and functioned in late medieval England. Against a backdrop of high morality, widespread disease and persistent problems of public health, it considers what alternatives were available to the patient, from society doctors to wise women, quacks and hospitals for the sick poor. Medical theories and practices of the time are investigated, along with the often satirical and sometimes hostile attitudes of the man on the street.

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers

Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers PDF

Author: Christi Sumich

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2013-10-10

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 9401209472

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Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers examines the discourse of seventeenth-century English physicians to demonstrate that physicians utilized cultural attitudes and beliefs to create medical theory. They meshed moralism with medicine to self-fashion an image of themselves as knowledgeable health experts whose education assured good judgment and sage advice, and whose interest in the health of their patients surpassed the peddling of a single nostrum to everyone. The combination of morality with medicine gave them the support of the influential godly in society because physicians’ theories about disease and its prevention supported contemporary concerns that sinfulness was rampant. Particularly disturbing to the godly were sins deemed most threatening to the social order: lasciviousness, ungodliness, and unruliness, all of which were most clearly and threateningly manifested in the urban poor. Physicians’ medical theories and suggestions for curbing some of the most feared and destructive diseases in the seventeenth century, most notably plague and syphilis, focused on reforming or incarcerating the sick and sinful poor. Doing so helped propel physicians to an elevated position in the hierarchy of healers competing for patients in seventeenth-century England.

Saints, Cure-seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-century England

Saints, Cure-seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-century England PDF

Author: Ruth J. Salter

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1914049004

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The cults of the saints were central to the medieval Church. These holy men and women acted as patrons and protectors to the religious communities who housed their relics and to the devotees who requested their assistance in petitioning God for a miracle. Among the collections of posthumous miracle stories, miracula, accounts of holy healing feature prominently and depict cure-seekers successfully securing their desired remedy for a range of ailments and afflictions. What can these miracle accounts tell us of the cure-seekers' experiences of their journey from ill health to recovery, and how was healthcare presented in these sources? This book undertakes an in-depth study of the miraculous cure-seeking process through the lens of Latin miracle accounts produced in twelfth-century England, a time both when saints' cults particularly flourished and there was an increasing transmission and dissemination of classical and Arabic medical works. Focused on shorter miracula with a predominantly localised focus, and thus on a select group of cure-seekers, it brings together studies of healthcare and pilgrimage to look at an alternative to medical intervention and the practicalities and processes of securing saintly assistance.

Medicine and Religion c.1300

Medicine and Religion c.1300 PDF

Author: Joseph Ziegler

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1998-07-09

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0191542725

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This book takes a fresh look at the cultural role of medicine among learned people around 1300. It was at this time that learned medicine came to be fully incorporated into the academic system and began to win greater social acceptance. Joseph Ziegler argues that physicians and clerics did not confine the role of medicine to its physical therapeutic function, and that fusion rather than disjunction characterized the relationship between medicine and religion at that time. Much of this argument relies on language analysis and on a close study of unedited manuscript sources. By juxtaposing the spiritual writings and the medical output of two learned physicians — Arnau de Vilanova (c. 1238-1311) and Galvano da Levanto (fl. 1300) — Dr Ziegler shows that they saw a medical purpose, namely to ensure the spiritual health of their audience and to reveal the mysteries of God and creation. When entering the spiritual realm, both brought to it a medical framework and extended their medical knowledge and curative activities from body to soul. By examining preachers' manuals and sermons, the author suggests that a growing tendency emerged among clerics in general and preachers in particular to appropriate current medical knowledge for spiritual purposes and to substantiate their extensive use of medical metaphors, analogies and exempla by citing specific medical authorities.