Medieval Medicine

A group of medical historians and paleographers has teamed up informally to create a "Medicine in the Long 12th Century Working Group."  More than 500 extant manuscripts from this period have been identified as containing Latin medical texts.  Adding in citations from 12th-century catalogs, we have at least 650 witnesses to the “common library” that made up learned medical knowledge throughout Europe in the long 12th century:  around 150 different texts in circulation, in some cases found in a single copy but in others in several dozens.  A revolution in medicine did indeed happen in this period.  But it was not a “revolution” based on wholesale absorption of new work made suddenly available in Latin from Arabic.  Nor was it a "revolution" based entirely at the southern Italian city of Salerno, which has long been centrally featured in narratives about medicine in this period.  This project aims to use the collected expertise of the contributors, and the ever-growing availability of digitized manuscripts (many made freely available on the Internet by their holding libraries), to create a comprehensive picture of medicine in this crucial period of change.  Our hope is that many subsidiary projects will emerge out of this, whether they be studies of individual texts, centers for copying manuscripts or studying medicine, or larger questions about the modes or impacts of programs of medical and scientific translations.

Estudi i edició de la traducció arabollatina feta per Arnau de Vilanova del "Llibre dels medicaments simples" d'Abu-s-Salt de Dénia, que visqué a la Península Ibèrica i al Nord d’Àfrica entre els segles XI i XII. El volum inclou un estudi bilingüe, en català i en anglès, i també l'edició de l'original àrab i una transcripció del manuscrit de la traducció catalana del s. XIV feta del llatí.
http://www.fundacionoguera.com/fitxa-publicacio.asp?idp=215
http://www.publicacions.ub.edu/ficha.aspx?cod=06359

This paper explores how tales of difficult births found in medieval miracle narratives can contribute to our understanding of the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth-century England. While rare in the early collections, pregnant and parturient women are increasingly visible in the miracula from the later twelfth century. This paper seeks to explain why childbirth miracles began to appear more frequently and became more medical in character. The discussion centres on the two miracle collections belonging to St Thomas of Canterbury, written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the 1170s. Explanations for the more frequent appearance of childbirth miracles are found, not in the changing relationship between humans and saintly intercessors, nor in the contemporary interest in the maternity of the Virgin Mary but in the specific context of the cult of St Thomas and the new emphasis given to lay testimony.

ТОЛЬКО ОЗНАКОМИТЕЛЬНЫЙ ФРАГМЕНТ, электронная версия не распространяется.

Роджер Бэкон: алхимия, астрология, магия и медицина (сборник) / М. М. Пэттисон Мьюр, Г. С. Редгроув, Л. Торндайк, Э. Т. Уитингтон, Г. У. Л. Хайм / Пер. с англ. и лат., коммент. Ю. Ф. Родиченкова ; предисл. Б. К. Двинянинова, Ю. Ф. Родиченкова ; послесл. С. А. Панина ; под общ. ред. Б. К. Двинянинова. — СПб.: Издательство «Академия исследований культуры», 2021. — 240 с.: ил. — (Серия Librarium Aureum. Opus Minus). ISBN 978–5-94396–224–0 Уменьшенный формат, тв. обложка, тираж 300 экз.

Роджер Бэкон (ок. 1214 — ок. 1292) — английский философ и естествоиспытатель, монах-францисканец, профессор богословия, автор трактатов по алхимии. В сборник включены ранее не переводившиеся на русский язык работы известных и мало известных авторов конца XIX века начала XX века о Роджере Бэконе. В начале небольшая книга Герберта Стенли Редгроува «Роджер Бэкон. Отец экспериментальной науки и средневекового оккультизма» дает представление об экспериментах и эзотерическом наследии философа. Статья М. М. Пэттисона Мьюра «Роджер Бэкон: его отношение к алхимии и химии» более подробно раскрывает алхимический аспект его творчества. Далее следуют две одноименные, но различные в подходах работы — «Роджер Бэкон и порох», посвященные экспериментам с порохом, подполковника Г. У. Л Хайма и религиоведа Линна Торндайка. В заключение в статье «Роджер Бэкон и медицина» Э. Т. Уитингтон. раскрывает исторические особенности медицины XIII века и подробно останавливается на медицинских трактатах Р. Бэкона. Перевод снабжен предисловием и послесловием. Книга будет интересна широкому кругу читателей, а также культурологам, историкам философии, историкам науки, в частности химии и медицины, эзотериологам и всем интересующимся западной эзотерической традицией и корнями формирования экспериментальной науки.

Содержание

Б. К. Двинянинов, Ю. Ф. Родиченков.
Вместо предисловия переводчика ...................................... 5
Роджер Бэкон о секретах алхимии и магии ............................... 9
Роджер Бэкон и «Зеркало алхимии» .......................................... 13
Пророчества Роджера Бэкона о перспективах науки.................. 17

Г. С. Редгроув. Роджер Бэкон. Отец экспериментальной
науки и средневекового оккультизма.................................. 21
Заметка о портрете Роджера Бэкона ................................... 23
Глава I. Формирование взглядов Роджера Бэкона ............. 25
Глава II. Плоды обучения Роджера Бэкона......................... 37
Глава III. Астрология ........................................................... 49
Глава IV. Алхимия............................................................... 57
Глава V. Медицина............................................................... 67
Глава VI. Магия и открытие пороха.................................... 75

М. М. Пэттисон Мьюр. Роджер Бэкон: его отношение
к алхимии и химии............................................................... 85

Г. У. Л. Хайм. Роджер Бэкон и порох ....................................... 139
Cap. IX. De modo faciendi ovum philosophorum ................ 148
Cap. X. De codem, sed alio modo......................................... 152
Cap. XI. De eodem, tamen alio modo................................... 158

Л. Торндайк. Роджер Бэкон и порох ........................................ 167

Э. Т. Уитингтон. Роджер Бэкон и медицина............................ 175
Медицина тринадцатого века .............................................. 177
Медицинские трактаты Роджера Бэкона............................. 196

С. А. Панин. Роджер Бэкон и его историческое значение ....... 217

Библиография .............................................................................. 231

This paperback edition of the 'Trotula' ensemble differs from the 2001 hardback edition in the following ways:
- it omits the critical edition of the Latin "standardized ensemble," retaining only the modern English translation
- the historical Introduction remains the same, aside from the correction of a few minor errors
- it omits the Index verborum (list of all specialized Latin terminology) of the 2001 edition; instead, it offers an index of Materia medica Employed in the 'Trotula'

One of the rarest afflictions to come across within twelfth century English hagiography is the double disability of being deaf and mute; in fact, of the eight hagiographic sources, and two-hundred and ninety-two accounts of individuals, that I have researched for my thesis there are only three sufferers (the equivalent of 1%); and in fact, as separate afflictions, there are only seventeen accounts (6%) of muteness and two of deafness (0.6%).

Of these three joint cases, two individuals are cured and one is punished with these disabilities. But, what is particularly interesting thought is that within these rare examples miracle cures the saintly remedy given does not cure both afflictions automatically.  In the Vita et Miracula Sancta Æbbe Virginis, deafness is cured by Becket but it is not until later that Æbbe restores speech to the man (MAE.4.vii) whilst in Miracula S. Swithuni the boy learns to speak from spending time at the tomb of Winchester’s famous saint.  Two questions immediately spring to mind with regards to the rarity of such accounts; firstly, how likely was it that someone suffering from this double disability would attempt to find a cure and secondly why do the saints appear to be unwilling to offer their full services?

This paper considers how the deaf and mute (and those who were both deaf and mute) are reflected within twelfth-century hagiographies and why these cases are quite so rare.  It will also consider the problems of partial cures and what that meant for both the cults and for the sufferer.  Is the lack of mention due to the fact that these where disabilities that could be lived with or were cures less forthcoming (and therefore the cure-seekers have gone unrecorded)?

In 1536, at the siege of Turin, French military surgeon Ambroise Paré changed surgical history. At that time, it was the custom to treat gunshot wounds by pouring boiling oil into them, often without removing the fragment or bullet. Paré, having run out of this cauterizing mixture, was forced to use a non-abrasive digestive to treat some of his wounded patients. This surgical procedure ultimately proved that gunshot wounds should not be treated by cauterization. Gunpowder weapons, however, had been in use for more than two centuries before Pare's discovery. During this time undoubtedly many victims wounded with gunshot must have suffered through cauterization. This has given rise to the belief among modern medical historians that the tradition of treating gunshot wounds which Paré corrected was formed and developed during the late Middle Ages. This article takes an opposing viewpoint to that theory. Using both late medieval surgical manuals and examples of gunshot wound treatmen...

Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West traces the history of medicine and medical practice from Ancient Egypt through to the end of the Middle Ages. Featuring nearly one hundred primary documents and images, this book introduces readers to the words and ideas of men and women from across Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, from prominent physicians to humble healers. Each of the book’s ten chronological and thematic chapters is given a significant historical introduction, in which each primary source is described in its original context. Many of the included source texts are newly translated by the editor, some of them appearing in English for the first time.

Margery Kempe's various illnesses, mental, spiritual and physical, are a recurring theme in her Book. This volume, the first full-length interdisciplinary study from a medical humanities perspective, offers a medicalized reading of Kempe's spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, and thus a new way of interpreting the Book itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject.
Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the author explores the ontology of female flesh; the productive use of pain, suffering and sickness; and the ethics of a maternal theology based on the melancholic and surrogate activities that underlie Kempe's experience. Structured broadly via a traverse through the life course, the book shows how Kempe's response to suffering is illuminated by the medieval medical discourse by which she is contemporaneously read, and by which she engineers her own construction and understanding of self. It also explores Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels.

An ambitious project with a beautiful outcome.

At first glance the fields of women and gender during the medieval millennium seem vast and insuperable. This volume is a must for students of Gender and Women’s Studies. It also offers interesting insights to the expert since so many different nuances are collectively addressed.

Resumo
Este estudo tem por objetivo dar a conhecer o modo como o Homem medieval enfrentou os desafios que se colocavam à sua saúde e bem-estar na cidade e região de Coimbra, nos finais da Idade Média. Começamos por descrever alguns dos tratamentos e cuidados dispensados aos doentes no meio urbano e social onde estavam integrados, focando-nos depois na assistência prestada aos enfermos nos hospitais de Coimbra e de Montemor-o-Velho. Por fim, centraremos a nossa atenção nas medidas de controlo de doenças contagiosas, como a lepra, e de surtos de peste, adotadas pelos poderes civis. **//**
Abstract
The goal of this article is to analyse how the medieval Man faced the challenges to his health and wellbeing in the late medieval Coimbra city and region. We start to describe the treatment and care given to the sick in their urban and social environment, focusing on those provided in Coimbra and Montemor-o-Velho hospitals. Finally, we will examine the measures taken by civil authorities to control plague outbreaks and other contagious diseases, like leprosy.

The text is a review on Russian edition of Jack Hartnell’s book «Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages» (London: Wellcome Collection, 2018). The structure of the book is analyzed with special attention on the quality of its translation into Russian
and the mistakes made by the editors.

This Genizah fragment relates “on unimpeachable authority” an event that took place at a lively Sufi meditation ceremony in the early 1200s in present-day Syria in the city of Raqqa. A group of holy men had gathered together with musicians. . . .

"Surrounded by both joys and anxieties, childbirth united women and
men across classes, regions, and religions in medieval Europe even as differences of class, region, and religion produced divergent practices and concerns. The history of childbirth and the postpartum period in medieval Europe is inherently difficult to reconstruct as it was embedded in the lives of women and the household, neither of which normally generated public documents. Nevertheless, creative uses of a variety of source materials have considerably expanded our understanding of the practices and attitudes related to childbirth and the care of the mother and neonate."

Through this paper, we want to analyze the evolution of Ancient Hippocratic philosophy regarding the humoral theory (the medical concept humorism or humoralism) synthesized by Galen and spread through space and time because of his writings. Starting from Galen's work, De Subtiliante Diaeta, we will try to see how the diet, especially one rich in liquids, modifies the ratio between the four constituent elements of the organism and therefore influences the individual`s relationship with their water and food supply needed for proper bodily functions.
In drawing up this analysis we will pursue both a historiographical approach, regarding Galen's theory, as well as a systematic approach to the primary source. The relationship a man has with the water he drinks or extracts from the consumed food is approached by all written cultures, from the beginning of history to the present day, water being the main necessary element of survival. As many of the Ancient, Medieval and Pre-Modern conceptions have their root in the humoral theories of Hippocrates and Galen, the issue becomes even more relevant as drinking water was not easily accessible (compared to the Contemporary period in developed countries), and water-rich foods provided a great supply of liquids.

From Winston Black in The Medieval Review 15.06.24...

'In the concluding essay, "The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination," Lila Yawn clearly takes the most chances and has the most fun in exploring the topic of medieval wounds and wounding. After a review of graphic and supposedly "medieval" dismemberments in modern movies and literature, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, or Pulp Fiction, Yawn poses the simple question of "how medieval cutting up living bodies really was" (218). In response, she gives a whirlwind tour of nearly two millennia of images and descriptions of amputation, dismemberment, fragmentation, and mutilation from Cicero to Thomas Jefferson. In so doing she demonstrates, as many medieval apologists have already noted, that there is no greater amount or degree of dismemberment in the Middle Ages than before or after, but what leads moderns to equate "medieval" with "dismemberment" is the medieval tendency to celebrate dismemberment and put severed body parts on display, be they of the criminal or of the saint.'

The Medieval Review 15.06.24
Kirkham, Anne, and Cordelia Warr, eds. Wounds in the Middle Ages. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. pp. xvi, 254. $124.95 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409465690 (hardback).
Reviewed by: Winston Black, Assumption College. black@assumption.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/19219/25339

This book focuses on the Shrine Madonnas, or Vierges ouvrantes, sculptures which conceal within their bodies complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s, and reached a peak of popularity during the following three centuries. I argue that the appearance of these objects—predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation—points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex performative ways the audiences were expected to engage with devotional art, both in public and in private. The book, which offers the first sustained analysis of these fascinating sculptures, considers them in terms of the rhetoric of secrecy, the discourse of containment, and the tropes of unveiling, and within the context of the increasingly important roles of sight and touch in late medieval devotional art. Aside from the objects themselves, the author considers evidence from play texts, travel logs, convent chronicles, descriptions of ceremonial feast day liturgies, automata diagrams and descriptions, visionary accounts, philosophical debates on the Eucharist, devotional handbooks, and treatises on optics, the senses, anatomy, childbirth, and memory. Specifically, I explore how the statues were associated with the processes of seeing and memory-making, and how they functioned as instruments of revelatory knowledge and spiritual reformation in the context of late medieval European culture and devotional art.

Recipient of the Millard Meiss Publication Grant and the Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center of Medieval Art.

This essay sprang out of a simple question:  what evidence was there for medieval European women’s engagement as readers with the increasing abundance of medical literature in the High and later Middle Ages?  I was working in the mid and later ’90s on my edition of the so-called Trotula texts (including surveys of the circulation and uses of both the Latin originals and their many vernacular reincarnations) and I wanted to be able to make a declarative statement:  “The evidence for female audiences of the Trotula conform (or not) to evidence for women’s reading of other kinds of medical texts.”  But I couldn’t make that statement because no survey of that question had yet been done.  This comprehensive essay, therefore, represents my attempt to gather everything I could find to document that women (a) owned medical books or (b) had medical books dedicated to them (whether as individual readers or female audiences generally). 

The results were astonishingly meager:  although women are now widely documented as readers of religious texts in the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, as readers of romances and histories, evidence for women engaging with the technically specific field of medicine is limited.  In fact, that result is even more decisive for texts on women’s medicine, where female owners or addressees are notably rare.  When women did own or serve as (intended) audiences of medical texts, these were often books of regimen (how to stay healthy), herbals, or recipe collections.  French women (or at least those of the very highest social classes) were the most notable exception to this rule; of 27 women whose booklists had been published, a quarter of them were found to own medical books.  Still, these are small numbers, especially considering that one of the most famous medical books addressed to a lay reader was Aldobrandino of Siena’s Regime du corps (Regimen for the Body), written before 1257 for Beatrix of Savoy (d. 1287), countess of Provence on the occasion of her visit to her four daughters: Marguerite, wife of Louis IX of France; Eleanor, wife of Henry Ill of England; Sanchia, wife of Richard of Cornwall; and Beatrix, wife of Charles of Anjou.  Notably, of the 71 extant copies known at the time of writing, only 5 can be documented in women’s hands.

Tables included in the study identify (1) Individual Female Owners of Medical Books (identifying 43 women in all); (2) Medical Texts Commissioned by and/or Addressed to Women (identifying 51 texts in all); and (3) A Comparison of Texts Owned by and Addressed to Women (divided according to language and medical genre).  (For information on medical books owned by or associated with professional female practitioners and cloistered women, see my essay “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages,” Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 20 (2000), 331-69; for further analysis of women’s relationships to the culture of literate medicine in high and late medieval Europe, see Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).)

Picking up from where John F. Benton left off in his 1985 study announcing the discovery of the *Practica* of Trota of Salerno, the present investigation brings together all known evidence for the writings and precepts of this early 12th-century Salernitan healer, for whom we have no other contemporary evidence beyond these writings themselves.  Using the evidence of the *Practica secundum Trotam* (“Practical Medicine According to Trota”) as well as the compendium *De egritudinum curatione* (a collection of excerpts from the works of seven Salernitan “masters,” including Trota) and the *De curis mulierum* (“On Treatments for Women”) and even an Anglo-Norman text which purports to record the teachings of Trota, I argue that collation of this evidence shows that Trota's oeuvre was probably much larger than previously suspected. Trota’s historicity was already established by Benton, and she can now be clearly distinguished from the textual fiction “Trotula,” which is in reality just the title of an ensemble of the *De curis mulierum* and two other, unrelated texts of likely male authorship. The present study offers further circumstantial evidence about the historic Trota, suggesting that it is possible to place her in the early 12th century. She was to some extent aware of and in dialogue with fellow male practitioners in Salerno, but she remained peripheral to the general trends toward theory and sophisticated pharmacopeia that characterized the work of her male contemporaries. The study includes editions and translations of excerpts of Trota’s authentic works and other *testimonia*.

This is a revised version of my description of the *Antidotarium magnum*, a collection of over 1000 medical recipes produced at Monte Cassino by (or under the direction of) the Tunisian immigrant monk, Constantine the African (d. before 1098/1099). This is the first Latin work of pharmaceutics to incorporate the new materia medica of the Islamicate world. Unlike Constantine's other works (which were all translations of Arabic texts into Latin), the *Antidotarium magnum* seems to be a genuine effort to integrate traditional recipes from the Greek and Latin ancient and late antique traditions, with the newer approaches to pharmacy that Constantine brought to Italy from the other side of the Mediterranean. Included is a complete list of extant manuscripts, as well as a bibliography of studies published to date.

Recent work has shown that Islamicate philosophers engaged meaningfully with Ibn Sīnā's transformation of Aristotelian physics, particularly his new understanding of motion at an instant and his new category of positional motion. Although Ibn Sīnā considered medicine a derivative science of physics, little work has been done to determine the impact of the new Avicennan physics on medicine. In this paper, I shall examine the discussions on motion contained in the sections on pulse within seven medical commentaries produced between 1200 and 1520 CE. The examination will reveal that Ibn al-Nafīs's novel, non-Galenic application of the Avicennan category of * I would like to thank Asad Ahmed, Sonja Brentjes and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Nelle ricerche contemporanee, i gemelli offrono un punto di vista privilegiato per provare a tracciare una possibile linea di demarcazione tra ciò che dipende dalla "natura" (dal patrimonio genetico) e ciò che è invece prodotto dalle condizioni ambientali e socio-culturali. Ma già nel Medioevo i gemelli avevano attirato l'attenzione di medici e maestri universitari per la possibilità di avvalersene come banco di prova per i propri modelli teorici. Il volume si propone una prima ricognizione dei dibattiti medievali sui gemelli, tenendo conto dell'intersezione tra istanze epistemologiche diverse: mediche, morali, filosofiche e teologiche. I gemelli permettono in effetti ai medievali non solo di ripensare le teorie sulla generazione umana ereditate dal mondo greco-romano, ma anche di valutare le pretese scientifiche di discipline come la fisiognomica e l'astrologia, di indagare il modo in cui la grazia diversifica la natura, e di testare (soprattutto attraverso la teratologia e i casi di gemelli congiunti) una serie di ipotesi sull'irripetibilità delle complessioni, sull'unicità o pluralità delle forme nel composto uma-no e sulla costituzione dell'identità individuale.

Now that a fair amount of Anglo-Norman medical literature has been edited (most of it by the Oxford scholar, Tony Hunt), it is possible to give some assessment of the genesis of this unusually early corpus of vernacular medical writing. Like the Anglo-Saxon medical corpus before it, the Anglo-Norman corpus makes a fundamentally Mediterranean system of medicine accessible to readers (and auditors) in the north. In fact, England was one of the biggest markets for southern Italian medicine in the 12th and 13th centuries: of all the Latin medical works circulating in this period, whether new compositions and translations or old classics, England had copies of well over half. Therefore, it becomes of interest to see which of those many works were chosen for translation into the vernacular. Although works of basic therapeutic utility like Roger of Frugardi’s *Chirurgia* and Johannes Platearius’s *Practica brevis* are known in unique copies, the field most represented in Anglo-Norman medical literature is women’s medicine: gynecology and cosmetics. The gynecological texts are all translations of some form or another of the so-called *Trotula* text, which came out of 12th-century Salerno, specifically the *Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum* (Book on Women’s Conditions). Likewise, the two known cosmetics works have clear signs of derivation from southern Italian practices. I hypothesize that these works may have been commissioned by women, who knew of the medical lore coming out of southern Italy through a variety of Norman contacts. Just how new works in “the French of England” interacted with older Anglo-Saxon terminology is an issue still in need of investigation.

In July 2010 an excavation was undertaken in the car park of the Masonic hall at Bawtry, South Yorkshire as part of a field school run by the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, with support from Wessex Archaeology (Sheffield). The Masonic hall was the chapel of the medieval hospital of Bawtry, and the principal aim of the field school was to throw new light on the hospital and on the cemetery that was associated with it, which had been identified during excavations in 2006 and 2007. During the 2010 excavation, eighteen graves were identified, and subsequent analysis of both the articulated and disarticulated skeletal remains identified a minimum number of fifty three individuals. It was demonstrated that the cemetery served a broad cross-section of the population, which was relatively healthy. A radiocarbon date is awaited from one of the skeletons, but at this stage all of the evidence indicates that the burials were all of later medieval date. A small number of medieval artefacts were recovered, including a 13th-century coin, a copper-alloy plate (of a type used in medieval medicinal cures for damaged or infected joints) and the copper-alloy ferrule from the end of a walking stick. The remains of a late medieval wall were encountered running eastwards from the east wall of the Masonic hall; this wall was either the remains of a boundary wall or of a building, and it appears to be perpetuated into the 19th century, when a wall in a similar location is depicted on images of the chapel.

Edizione critica, traduzione e commento a cura di Teofilo De Angelis.
Il «De Euboicis aquis» (già conosciuto con il nome di «De balneis Puteolanis» o «De balneis Terrae Laboris») è un’opera del poeta Pietro da Eboli (1160 ca.-1220?). Si tratta di un poema medico-didascalico, composto da 31 epigrammi e molto probabilmente dedicato all’Imperatore Enrico VI di Svevia, nel quale il poeta celebra le proprietà curative delle fonti termali che si trovano sulla costa della Campania di fronte al golfo di Pozzuoli, sul territorio denominato Campi Flegrei.

This book is an introduction to the medicine and art of the medieval body.

Taking its lead from medieval understandings of the human form, each of its chapters takes a different element of the body as its subject, from the head, senses, heart, and stomach to skin, bones, blood, and feet. Explaining the medical function and visual treatment of these individual parts within broader medieval therapeutic and artistic worlds, the book's chapters together put forward anatomised medieval bodies as a gateway onto medieval society, considering the ways it evoked, idolised, and distorted the body's forms.

Presenting long-standing traditions in the study of medieval medicine and art alongside cutting-edge historical research, the book maps the medieval body as both subject and object: from anatomical diagrams in illuminated manuscripts to saintly bones clothed in the golden skin of medieval reliquaries. Seen this way, objects and ideas from the Middle Ages can be bound tightly together into a complete corpus, encompassing contemporary attitudes to life, death and art.