An Acrostic in Quintus Serenus' Liber medicinalis?

A brief study of leprosy in the Middle Ages, its history, medical perception and social attitude toward manifestations of the disease. As a case study about the prevailing medical principles, we present some excerpts from Començaments de Medicina (c.1274-1283), Doctrina pueril (c. 1274-1276), Fèlix o Libre de Maravelles (1288-1289), and Liber prouerbiorum (c. 1296) by the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316). It presents the theoretical foundations of his Medicine: a metaphorical art that links the Hippocratic four elements (air, fire, earth and water) and Christian Theology using numeric symbolism.

Journal of Early Modern History, 2008

Histos, 2014

Medicine and Paradoxography in the Ancient World, 2019

This chapter surveys examples of two types of literary therapy in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi: a) the ‘rhetorical remedies’, b) the ‘poetic prescriptions’. It engages closely with the discourse of medical paradoxography in the Hieroi Logoi and the ways these remedies were received in the blooming Aristides-related scholarship of the last decade or so, and finishes with some general thoughts on declaiming, writing and narrating as a basic modality of therapy in the second sophistic. The aim is twofold: to demonstrate that Aristides is in fact far more mainstream in using rhetoric, literature and music to cure bodily ailments than we have previously thought, while simultaneously showcasing how exceptional Aristides’ use of these particular remedies really is. Although Aristides works with previously well-attested healing practises (e.g. in Plutarch, Galen, Antyllus) and commemorative discourses, he elevates them to a whole new level of efficacy and embeds them firmly into his rhetorical oeuvre. Keywords: books, poetry, reading, writing, song(s), hymn(s), sacred medicine, secular medicine, medical paradoxography, Asclepieion, Aelius Aristides, Galen, Asclepius, illness, literary therapy, patient(s), doctor(s), temple of Asclepius, Pergamum, Epidaurus.

(2019) ‘The curious case of Aelius Aristides. The author as sufferer and illness as “individualizing motif”, in Eve-Marie Becker and Jörg Rüpke (eds), Autoren in religiösen literarischen Texten der späthellenistischen und der frühkaiserzeitlichen Welt. Zwölf Fallstudien, Mohr Siebeck, 199-219., 2019

This chapter revisits the Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi as a literary work both innovative and illustrative of its socio-political milieu. While Aristides utilises traditional discourses and literary genres attested in both literary sources and epigraphy (in particular, aretalogical discourse, healing pilgrimage narratives, and medical paradoxography), he still succeeds in emphasising his exceptionality both as an author and a sufferer. The means by which this textual individuality is achieved are mainly Aristides’ insistence in the uniqueness of his bodily ailments and the inimitability of Asclepius’ ‘tailor-made’ therapies. In presenting himself as a sufferer and Asclepius as the only physician who successfully diagnoses and treats his complex and unique ailments, Aristides operates within the generic constraints of the related genres of aretalogy and medical paradoxography. In utilising illness as an individualising motif, he does not simply seek to establish himself as a divinely inspired orator and a distinguished devotee of the god. In building up the complexity and the unusualness of his illness, he builds up the encomium of his divine healer.

The Classical Review, 2012

The article draws on a series of 14 th-15 th centuries medical texts which belong to the genre called " Advises against the plague ". Our study demonstrates how the half forgotten Tuscan physicians – Gentile da Foligno, Franceschino da Collignano, Niccolò da Burgo – put forward the " pneumatological " etiology of the infections (conception of the " corrupted air " and infection of the spiritus); we set forth the hypothesis according to which this problematization of this intermediary level between the spiritual and the corporeal will largely contribute to the constitution of the " twinkling " idiom of the Marsilio Ficino's platonicizing medicine.

The Classical Review, 2009