The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing

The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing PDF Author: Barbara S. Bowers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781472449627
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume challenges and redefines the traditional distinction made between the sacred and the secular in medieval healing, medical practice, and theory as evidenced in the historic, text record, and by material culture (sites and objects). The studies here are interdisciplinary and are grouped into two parts. The first focuses on secular and religious texts, demonstrating how the language of sacred and secular healing blurs and merges in both Latin and vernacular textual traditions. Chapters critically examine how medieval English literature draws directly from medical discourse when representing the physical and moral consequences of wrath; the reasons why empirical experience in medical education is central to the writings of Valesco de Tarenta; the narrative significance of Bede s representation of plague in his eighth-century prose Life of Cuthbert; and the implications of distinctions between late medieval religious sermons and secular discourse on plague. Authors also discuss how secular medicine and religious faith intersect in two, recorded, late medieval English miracles and present the largely unexplored impact of access to food on people s everyday health. The second part investigates how the concepts of the sacred and the secular are seen in material culture. Chapters explore how the practice of lapidary medicine by early practitioners and midwives used the protective and healing properties ascribed to gemstone amulets, eagle-stones, and lodestones. At pilgrimage sites, the dynamic nature of cure and spiritual interaction is evidenced in art and artifact. One type of object, pilgrim badges from English sites, is used to explore statistically the wider social context of faith and healing."

The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing

The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing PDF Author: Barbara S. Bowers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781472449627
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume challenges and redefines the traditional distinction made between the sacred and the secular in medieval healing, medical practice, and theory as evidenced in the historic, text record, and by material culture (sites and objects). The studies here are interdisciplinary and are grouped into two parts. The first focuses on secular and religious texts, demonstrating how the language of sacred and secular healing blurs and merges in both Latin and vernacular textual traditions. Chapters critically examine how medieval English literature draws directly from medical discourse when representing the physical and moral consequences of wrath; the reasons why empirical experience in medical education is central to the writings of Valesco de Tarenta; the narrative significance of Bede s representation of plague in his eighth-century prose Life of Cuthbert; and the implications of distinctions between late medieval religious sermons and secular discourse on plague. Authors also discuss how secular medicine and religious faith intersect in two, recorded, late medieval English miracles and present the largely unexplored impact of access to food on people s everyday health. The second part investigates how the concepts of the sacred and the secular are seen in material culture. Chapters explore how the practice of lapidary medicine by early practitioners and midwives used the protective and healing properties ascribed to gemstone amulets, eagle-stones, and lodestones. At pilgrimage sites, the dynamic nature of cure and spiritual interaction is evidenced in art and artifact. One type of object, pilgrim badges from English sites, is used to explore statistically the wider social context of faith and healing."

Sacred Heritage

Sacred Heritage PDF Author: Roberta Gilchrist
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108496547
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Forges innovative connections between monastic archaeology and heritage studies, revealing new perspectives on sacred heritage, identity, medieval healing, magic and memory. This title is available as Open Access.

The Secret in Medieval Literature

The Secret in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666917877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture

Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture PDF Author: Virginia Langum
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113744990X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.

Leprosy and identity in the Middle Ages

Leprosy and identity in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Elma Brenner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152612744X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
For the first time, this volume explores the identities of leprosy sufferers and other people affected by the disease in medieval Europe. The chapters, including contributions by leading voices such as Luke Demaitre, Carole Rawcliffe and Charlotte Roberts, challenge the view that people with leprosy were uniformly excluded and stigmatised. Instead, they reveal the complexity of responses to this disease and the fine line between segregation and integration. Ranging across disciplines, from history to bioarchaeology, Leprosy and identity in the Middle Ages encompasses post-medieval perspectives as well as the attitudes and responses of contemporaries. Subjects include hospital care, diet, sanctity, miraculous healing, diagnosis, iconography and public health regulation. This richly illustrated collection presents previously unpublished archival and material sources from England to the Mediterranean.

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion PDF Author: Sarah McNamer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's Mirror and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.

Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images

Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images PDF Author: Dafna Nissim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111243893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World

The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World PDF Author: Bonnie Effros
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190234180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1166

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Book Description
Examines research from a variety of fields, including archaeology, bio-archaeology, architecture, hagiographic literature, manuscripts, liturgy, visionary literature and eschalology, patristics, numismatics, and material culture, Diverse list of contributors, many whose research has never before been available in English, Provides substantial research regarding women's history in the Merovingian period, Expands research beyond Europe to include other cultures that came in contact with the Merovingians Book jacket.

Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce (1425-1495)

Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce (1425-1495) PDF Author: Giacomo Mariani
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004507337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
The book offers a renewed study of the life and works of one of the most famous popular preachers and sermon authors of Renaissance Italy, providing a reference work on the figure of Roberto Caracciolo and a reading of his times.

Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry

Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry PDF Author: Eve Salisbury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350249815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Exploring medical writing in England in the 100+ years after the advent of the “Great Mortality”, this book examines the storytelling practices of poets, patients, and physicians in the midst of a medieval public health crisis and demonstrates how literary narratives enable us to see a kinship between poetry and the healing arts. Looking at how we can learn to diagnose a text as if we were diagnosing a body, Salisbury provides new insights into how we can recuperate the voices of those afflicted by illness in medieval texts when we have no direct testimony. She considers how we interpret stories told by patients in narratives mediated by others, ways that women factor into the shaping of a medical canon, how medical writing intersects with religious belief and memorial practices governed by the Church, and ways that regimens of health benefit a population in the throes of an epidemic.