scholarly journals Pain in Medieval and Modern Contexts

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Trembinski

Intellectual historians of the High Middle Ages have generally argued that scholastic medicine had little influence on the study of theology in medieval universities, especially in the thirteenth century. Yet three chairs of theology at the University of Paris in the early 1200s had previous careers as physicians. Their extant work suggests that they did turn to their medical roots to explicate theological problems, sometimes rarely, as in the work of Guerric of St. Quentin, but sometimes more often as in the work of Roland of Cremona. Indeed Roland’s work on human and divine emotions, including his discussions of sadness and pain, demonstrates that Roland was dedicated to integrating his medical learning into his theological arguments and to ensuring that the positions of his medical training were in agreement with the theological arguments he made. A short conclusion suggests historiographical reasons for why the medical influence on early Parisian theological treatises has generally been overlooked, pointing to the separate nature of study of mind and body that has occurred since the rise of Cartesian dualism in the seventeenth century.

2013 ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Healey

Troutbeck in the Lake District has a long run of landholding records, dating from the village's first appearance in the thirteenth century until modern times. This article uses these to recreate the nature of landholding across a broad span of history from the high Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. It finds that numbers of customary landholders continued to grow despite the recurrent disasters of plague, famine and war in the fourteenth century, and showed growth again between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The seventeenth century then brought two major changes: there were a growing number of subtenants up until the 1620s. Then, after old restrictions on the parcelling of tenements were lifted in the 1670s, landholdings started to fragment, and a group of small customary landholders developed and survived into the eighteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Philippa Byrne

Abstract The episcopacy in the High Middle Ages (c.1100–1300) can be understood through the idea of a shared emotional language, as seen in two treatises written to advise new bishops. In them, episcopal office was largely defined by the emotions it provoked: it was a cause for sorrow, a burden akin to back-breaking agricultural service. The ideas most associated with episcopal office were anxiety, labour and endurance. Ideas about Christian service as painful labour became particularly important in the twelfth century, alongside the development of the institutional authority of the Church. As episcopal power began to look more threatening and less humble, this emotional register provided one means of distinguishing episcopal power from secular lordly power: both were authorities, but bishops were distinguished by sorrowing over office and ‘enduring’, not enjoying it.


distinctive character of eighteenth-century evangelicalism, the focus has to be upon the ways in which these four elements were changed, modified or dif-ferently understood, or how they were given an altered significance during this period. Here, the seventeenth-century historian moves beyond his strict sphere of competence and into the realm of speculation. However, it would seem that one key discontinuity between the puritan theology of the seventeenth cen-tury and much of the evangelicalism of the eighteenth is that of the university context. Certainly in the form of English and Dutch puritanism, seventeenth-century Protestantism represented a successful marriage between academic theology and pastoral concern, whereby supremely accomplished learning connected with the life of the everyday believer through the media of ser-mons, catechisms and the pastorates of men who were well versed in scholastic theology. As such, it held two apparently incompatible strands of Protestant thought and life together: the need for a responsible, learned and theological approach to the biblical text and the belief that every individual, from the greatest to the least, had the responsibility to believe in God for their own salvation. Events in the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, served to rupture this relationship. In England the Restoration of 1660 and the subsequent imposition of the Clarendon Code effectively terminated puritanism as a movement and excluded not only serving puritan ministers but also subsequent generations of Nonconformists from both the Anglican ministry and, more importantly, from the universities. When nearly 2,000 puritan ministers left the established church in 1662, they took their theological tradition away from its academic roots in a university culture which stemmed from the Middle Ages and had been modified by the Renaissance. Their heirs in English Nonconformity were often men of formidable intellect – the names of Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge spring immediately to mind – but they were not university men. They were not schooled in the language and thought forms of their puritan forebears and the theology they expounded did not coincide with that of their heritage in some of its most important aspects.


Traditio ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 313-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Lohr

The history of Latin Aristotelianism reaches roughly from Boethius to Galileo — from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Whereas the early Middle Ages knew only a part of Aristotle's logic, the whole Aristotelian corpus became known in the period around 1200. From the middle of the thirteenth century to the end of the Middle Ages, and in some circles even beyond, the influence of these works was decisive both for the system of education and for the development of philosophy and natural science.


1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Freiesleben

The term ‘portolan chart’ first occurs in Italy in the thirteenth century, not long after this aid to navigation came into general use on board ship. The Italian word portolano, however, can best be translated as ‘pilot book’ or ‘sailing directions’, a different aid to navigation of which one example survives from the fourth century b.c., and pilot books are indeed still published in modern form by all seafaring nations. References by Herodotus in the History make it probable that such documents already existed in his time, and under the name of periplus they continued up to the sixth century a.d.; after which they do not appear again until the golden age of navigation in Italy and Catalonia in the late Middle Ages, apart from some much simpler early medieval types. The portolano or periplus is a description of ports, with information required by the navigator concerning anchorages, dangers threatening landfall and the winds and weather over wider areas. Commercial information was sometimes included, obviously also a matter of interest to the mariner who could read, though it may be doubted if many of them then could.Italian portolan charts exist from almost the same period as the portolani, both of them denoted by the same word compasso, but while the pilot books have their modern successors the charts were only produced up to the beginning of the seventeenth century and are not really the forerunners of the modern sea chart.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Natalia JAKUBECKI

As is well know, one of the most impressive mentalities of the Middle Ages was that of scholastic thought. The scholastic, in its true sense, must be understood as a particular type of didactics used to understand the Holy Scriptures and doctrines of the faith. Nevertheless it was specifically the modus operandi of the masters of the medieval universities. It reached its zenith in the 13th century thanks, fundamentally, to two simultaneous phenomena: the return to the West of Aristotle’s works and the creation of the University. However, this forma mentis had already begun to develop in the works of several previous thinkers, perhaps the most significant of which being Sic et Non, by Peter Abelard. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article will focus on the methodological principles that Abelard introduces in the prologue of his work. This will then allow us to compare the substance of the rupture with, and renovation of, previous thinking as well as to emphasise the contributions that so intimately link it to the first scholastic.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 409-409
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen

Famous medieval writers continuously find modern publishers willing to produce ever new translations into modern vernacular languages, while the vast majority of contemporary medieval authors linger in the margins and often continue to await even the publication of a critical edition of their works. This is the case with Marie de France as well, whose lais have now been translated into English once again by Claire M. Waters who is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She has previously published studies such as Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (2003), Virgins and Scholars: A Fifteenth-Century Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria (2008), and Translating Clergie: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts (2016).


2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-129
Author(s):  
Tarrin Wills

While in the High Middle Ages runic literacy appears to have been very much alive in urban centres such as Bergen, interest in runes appears to have been of a different nature in learned circles and in other parts of the Scandinavian world which had adopted widespread textual production of the Latin alphabet. This paper examines a number of runic phenomenon from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Denmark and Iceland to argue that they belong to a cultural revival movement rather than forming part of a continuous runic tradition stretching back into the early Middle Ages. Some of these runic texts show some connection with the Danish royal court, and should rather be seen as forming part of the changes in literary culture emanating from continental Europe from the late twelfth century and onwards: they all show a combined interest in Latin learning and vernacular literary forms.


1993 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 302-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Fortuna

During the sixteenth century Galen'sDe constitutione artis medicae(i.224–304 Kühn) enjoyed a great success: in about fifty years it received four different Latin translations and three commentaries. Certainly this is also true of other medical classical texts, but such success is surprising for a treatise which did not have a wide circulation either in the Middle Ages or in the seventeenth century and later. In fact it is preserved in its entirety in only one Greek manuscript (Florence, Laur. plut. 74.3 = L of the twelfth or thirteenth century, with later corrections = L) and in a Latin translation by Niccolò of Reggio, who worked mainly for King Robert I in Naples in the first half of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, in his edition of 1679 René Chartier made a mistake, which the humanistic editors of the Greek Galen had avoided. The last part of theDe const, art. med.itself enjoyed a considerablefortunaas an independent tract on prognosis in the Greek and Latin manuscript tradition. The editors of the Aldine and the Basle editions knew such anexcerptum, at least in the manuscript Par. gr. 2165 (= P) of the sixteenth century, and rightly decided not to print it. Chartier found it in the manuscript Par. gr. 2269 of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and published it in the wrong belief that it was a new treatise of Galen's (vol. ii. 170–95 = viii.891–5). He was followed by Carl Gottlob Kühn in his edition of 1821, who printed theDe const, art. med.in the first volume (289–304) and theDe praesagiturain vol. xix.497–511. The error was not publicly detected until Kalbfleisch in 1896.


Traditio ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McVaugh

A number of recently published studies have drawn attention to the ‘radical moisture,’ a concept developed in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages to help explain the nature of life and the occurrence of aging and of fevers. These studies have examined the broad history of the concept over a span of two thousand years; they have, however, not presented in detail the sequence of the transmission and evolution of the concept in the Middle Ages. It is my intent to focus upon the history of the radical-moisture concept in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to try to establish the particular stages by which it entered medieval medical doctrine, and in particular to examine the importance of Avicenna's Canon for western physicians in consolidating their first disorganized impressions of the concept. I shall illustrate the stages in the transmission process by referring to the use of the concept at the University of Montpellier, for that school has left us a number of texts from the thirteenth century that reveal how the introduction of new Arabic or Greek medical works could alter the medieval academic physician's approach to a familiar topic; they also reveal the way in which personal tastes and interests could lead colleagues to react differently to new materials.


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