Download PDF | Dr. Jan M. Ziolkowski - Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales_ The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (2007).

Download PDF | Dr. Jan M. Ziolkowski - Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales_ The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (2007).

513 Pages 

Introduction

 the tale of this fairy tale fifteen years ago I cast about for a topic that would enable me to connect today’s culture with the literature in my main field of interest (and please do not put down this book after reading the next three words), Medieval Latin literature. My professional situation prompted me to think of folktales and fairy tales. 

On the one hand, half of my appointment was in a classics department, where, at that time, the meaning and value of philology were topics of considerable discussion and even tension. In addition, I was trying to find common ground with most of my colleagues in Medieval Latin outside my university, who were predominantly Europeans, who held positions flagged explicitly as Medieval Latin philology, and who devoted much of their research and writing to editing, textual criticism and transmission, and other unquestionably philological pursuits. 

On the other hand, the remaining half of my salary came from a department in comparative literature, which I subsequently chaired for a number of years. Although comparative literature has never been defined overtly so as to exclude premodern literatures, the understanding of it as “the systematic study of supranational as - semblages” tends to diminish the ease of including in it literatures from before when nations existed.1 Furthermore, comparative literature, which was once bound up with the languages and literatures of different traditions, has become increasingly connected with theoretical approaches, among which the place of philology has been extremely controversial 

Classics and comparative literature differed starkly from each other in the time periods with which they were most often concerned and in the theoretical approaches with which they were associated. A way to elide the differences came to me through one of the happiest serendipities in my intellectual life. Very soon after being hired at Harvard, I had been enlisted by Albert B. Lord (1912–91) to serve on a committee devoted to the study of folklore and mythology. In seeking a confluence between my two or more intellectual identities, I gravitated toward a number of texts written in Medieval Latin that recounted tales that were also documented in later times (especially the Romantic era) in fairy tale collections. Some topics seemed too narrow and specific, others too broad and amorphous, but fairy tales seemed just right: Goldilocks would have been happy. Upon delving more deeply into these texts and the scholarship that had grown rampant around them, I discovered that the tales had been relatively neglected. Medieval Latinists had edited them and sometimes translated them (particularly into German or Italian), but on the whole they had not grappled in any depth with what the tales might mean, either in their own right or in their significance for the history of folktales and fairy tales. In such inter - pretations as had been formulated, Medieval Latinists had not been especially troubled about exploring closely the connections of the tales with folk liter - ature in general or the Grimm collection in particular. Although fairy tale scholars of past generations had sometimes noticed the tales and discussed them briefly, by and large the texts had been consigned to the same forlorn and overlooked corner where much of Medieval Latin literature has undeservedly languished. 

The texts were too unclassical for Medieval Latin philologists, too recherché (and too Latin) for folklorists and fairy tale scholars. But noticing that the tales recounted in these poems could help me to find an intersection with a general public (and even with my three daughters, who were children when the work began and are now adults), I became ever more convinced that the folktales and fairy tales recorded in Latin could afford one of the few means—and maybe the only one—for putting on display for a broad college audience the materials I study as a specialist. Already a decade and a half ago, it seemed that a professor could canvas twenty-five bright and well-schooled students and find surprisingly few texts, especially from before the twentieth century, that they would have in common. Even the Shakespeare they knew might turn out to be different comedies and tragedies: this one had read Macbeth and As You Like It, that one Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But to what poems, plays, or novels had they all been exposed? The common store of allusions among them was to be found not in literature and especially not in verse but instead in films, television, and celebrity-oriented current events. 

If acquaintance with Anglo-American literature from hundreds of years ago was limited, a collective familiarity with literature from elsewhere in the world and not in English had grown even slighter. Among the many factors that have come into play, both economics and politics of language have been involved.3 Although it was possible in the aftermath of World War II to hope for the foundation of a “world literature” (Weltliteratur) that would draw together the best from everywhere,4 it has become ever more common for people in the United States in particular to slake their thirst for exoticism by engaging texts produced by ethnic minorities within American culture or literatures written in English in (or translated into English from) outside cultures. I am not faulting this attraction, but I am suggesting that there is much to be gained by remaining open to narratives from other places and times. 

Being closed to human culture from earlier stretches of history is no different from xenophobia, racism, or other such hostilities, even if it harms no living victims. While pondering the least common denominators of Western culture as it manifests itself today (at least in North America), I realized that fairy tales could give me an ideal and probably unique opportunity. Fairy tales are one of the few literary genres shared by people of all ages and social classes in all Western countries, from Europe to America and beyond. Virtually the only type of older narrative known to everyone, regardless of age or education, are versions of the fairy tales that were given vintage expression by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), Madame Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–80), Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), and others; and even these tales are most often received not directly with acknowledgment of their authors’ names but, rather, as adapted in children’s picture books or animated films, without acknowledgment of their ultimate sources. 

A small subset of the Grimms’ fairy tales is known nearly everywhere. Sometimes the tales are familiar from one of the original collections; the first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, but the selection and contents of the collection evolved through the seventh, final edition, published in 1857 (confusingly, the final, 1856, edition of the Grimms’ own volume of commentary on their collected fairy tales is the third, not the seventh). Sometimes the tales have won favor separately as retold in individual illustrated children’s stories, other times in feature-length Walt Disney animations or other cartoon versions, advertisements, and other minor media (among which may be included scholarship). Because of the ways in which their stories and their collective name have permeated mass culture, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (and not very many in the populace at large are on a footing to know them by their first names, Jacob and Wilhelm) would loom large even if no one read another book. 

Being incorrigibly optimistic (if only when it comes to stories), I have faith that people will be inquisitive about ancient and medieval literatures if those literatures can be shown to relate somehow to their present. At the risk of sounding irreparably old-fashioned, I would maintain that past literature contains beauty and wisdom, both of which we can ill afford to jettison. Much older literature has survived a selection process that guarantees it has exercised a strength and depth of meaning over a variety of readers across a long time and wide space. That statement is a long-winded way of saying that much past literature is tried and true, which is why (from the Romantic era down to the present day) fairy tales have so often been viewed—without much examination of the reasons why—as the symbolic expression of a profound wisdom.5 Our culture, even our mass culture, could benefit from informed looks at past literature, even so far back as the Middle Ages and beyond.

 The heroes of comic books, video games, and best-selling children’s literature hold the same enormous appeal among popular audiences as do the writings of Joseph Campbell (1904–87), because people have an insatiable desire for stories that hold the promise of deep meaning—of revelation, therapy, life lessons, escape, and entertainment.6 In addition to building our entertainment and edification upon comic-book heroes and making feature-length films of narrativeless video games or old television serials, why not venture further afield and, in the process, find narratives that have been market tested across hundreds of years and thousands of miles? In the case of the medieval folktales and fairy tales, we have the chance to confront a triple challenge and receive a triple pleasure. Not only are the medieval texts fascinating in their own right, but they enable—and even require—both the exploration of folk literature in the Middle Ages and the study of its later appropriation and conversion, particularly in the Romantic era. 

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Download PDF | Erika Lauren Lindgren - Sensual Encounters_ Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany - (2009).

Download PDF | Erika Lauren Lindgren - Sensual Encounters_ Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany - (2009).

205 Pages 

Preface 

The following stylistic forms have been adopted for this work. Sister-Book(s) is used instead of Schwesternbuch(ër). Life/lives and vita/vitae are used interchangeably throughout the work. Where possible, place names have been anglicized, including those that are part of Dominican women's names. However, I have kept the medieval spelling and forms of the women's personal names, as well as those of their male counterparts, except in those cases where an anglicized version is already in common usage among scholars. Hence Heinrich Seuse becomes Henry Suso, but Johannes Tauler remains Johannes Tauler. I have translated von and de into the English of. Many of the women have the German feminine ending -in added to the end of their family names. 

I have chosen to retain this ending as this is the form in which the women appear in other documentation, and because it is not always clear if the ending is in fact an ending or perhaps part of the masculine version of the name as well. I have attempted to regularize all transcriptions from manuscripts and editions in the following manner. ß is rendered ss, unless it is within a direct quotation from a secondary source or it is transcribed from a primary source. All diphthongs are rendered as separate letters. I have normalized the diverse forms of umlauts found in the manuscripts and editions to reflect modern usage.

Introduction 

The Sensual Environment Kathrin Brümsin was a novice in the Dominican monastery of St. Katharinenthal on the southern banks of the Rhine River near Diessenhofen, Switzerland. In the seemingly eternal dilemma of many students, she had trouble with her studies. In this particular case, she was trying to learn the Latin liturgy that would be her life's work once she successfully became a nun. She struggled, and in a last ditch attempt to conquer the complexities of the liturgy, she offered up prayers to John the Evangelist, imploring him for assistance. That night Kathrin had a dream: She was in the choir of the church in her choirstall and an archbishop came and wanted to sing Mass. And it was asked who the bishop was. It was said that he was Saint John the Evangelist. 

And then the convent was happy beyond measure and received him with great joy. The bishop came in with great authority and went over to the altar and began In medio ecclesie. And the convent sang wonderfully. And when it came to the sacrifice, the entire convent went up to receive it. And when it was the novice's [Kathrin's] turn, she took the novicemistress with her. And when she came to the altar, Saint John said to her, "My child, why do you not pray to me?" She said, "Lord, I can not. I would like it to be otherwise with all my heart." Then he took her by the hand and placed her next to him and opened a book in which was written in golden letters his sequence Verbum dei deo natum and said to her, "This you should pray to me." And so she read the sequence completely in his presence, all twenty-four verses. And then she awoke and quickly arose and went to her sister and said, "Sister, I know Saint John's sequence in its entirety." The sister replied, "You can not learn anything at all. How can you say that you know it by heart?" [Kathrin answered,] "Saint John taught it to me." And she recited it all, so that not one word was lacking. In the elements of Kathrin's dream we can find much that tells us about her spirituality and the connection between that and her environment. The place in which her dream transpired, the sequence she learned, the dream book she learned it from, and the saint who taught it to her, all these come together in her vita to illustrate the complex web of relationships between belief and religious practice on the one hand, and environment on the other. For medieval Christians, spirituality was culturally constructed, influenced by their understanding of their surroundings and the items around them, expressed physically within the spaces they inhabited, coached in the language of their everyday experiences, and tied to their senses, especially those of sight and sound. 

The Sensual Environment and Spirituality This study explores the connections between the spirituality of medieval religious women and the environment in which they lived. A traditional environmental history that examined monastic women would look for the intersections between the women and nature. Such a traditional environmental history might consider the geography of women's monasteries, their influence upon the local landscape through agriculture and building projects, and how their lives were influenced by their place in that landscape. The impact of their sanitation systems, or lack thereof, upon the regional plant growth or water purity might be explored. I, however, propose a different kind of environmental history. It is a history of the sensual environment.

 The term environment is used here in its broadest sense to denote the entire surrounding in which these women were immersed, incorporating the architecture in which they dwelt, the objects that decorated those spaces, the books they read, and the sounds and silences which they created, heard, and observed. I label this the sensual environment because it was through their senses that these medieval religious women accessed and utilized their environment. I am concerned in many ways with the perception of environment by religious women. How did they experience their environment? How did they affect their environment? Did they manipulate it, promote it, interpret it? How did their environment influence and regulate them? The remnants of their environment can be found in the material culture that survives in word, image, and structure. This project is interdisciplinary in nature. In addition to history, it draws upon art history, manuscript studies, literature, theology, and occasionally archeology and musicology to convey the complex and holistic spiritual culture of medieval religious women. 

A history of the sensual environment of monasteries allows one to study, for the times, welldocumented, and fairly self-contained communities. Monasteries did not exist in a vacuum, but had distinguishable perimeters and boundaries which set them apart in a way that was more recognizable than most in a period that saw the growth of transient populations moving from the countryside to new, expanding urban settlements. As such, monasteries are environmental units that provide an ideal example for exploring the elements that went into composing such an environment. Since I am concerned with the ways in which religious women encountered their environment in relation to their spirituality, a division of the environment according to the senses sheds the most light on this interaction. To better understand the reciprocal and complex links between the spiritual and material environment, I have approached the issue through interrelated areas associated with the sense-experience of the women: the spatial environment, in which the women moved and which held all of the other environments; the visual environment, which encompassed what the women saw; the acoustic environment, which held all the various sounds and silences of the monastery; and the textual environment, which combined aspects of the visual and acoustic environment. 

The women experienced the environment through their senses, and their spirituality was heavily reliant upon their senses as well, so such a division is the most practical. The medieval understanding of the senses was based on classical science and philosophy, as well as medieval theology. It synthesized Aristotle's ancient Greek natural philosophy with the Roman medical work of the physician Galen and the writings of the early church fathers such as Tertullian, Jerome, and most importantly Augustine. By the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteen centuries it was added to by monastic and scholastic authors who were concerned with issues of perception and knowledge acquisition as well as different ways of knowing, of which the human senses were seen as the first stage of such activity. Augustine's almost monolithic influence on medieval intellectual development cannot be overstated. His theological legacy pervades the early Middle Ages to the exception of almost everyone else. After the introduction of Aristotelian works in the twelfth century, Augustine's influence can still be found among medieval intellectuals. 

But I am not concerned with how medieval scholastics understood the senses; rather I want to use the senses as a way to get at the holistic experiences of medieval religious women, because it is at the intersection of the senses (particularly seeing, hearing, and touching) and spirituality that the extent and variety of female monastic religious beliefs and practices is revealed. "As a style of response, spirituality is individually patterned yet culturally shaped." Each woman may have had a unique expression of her spirituality, but women living closely together in a community like a monastery would eventually have come to share some behaviors in common. Moreover, some forms of religious practice were imposed upon them. And as religious women, whose function in society was to carry out ritualized and individualized prayer for themselves and other Christians, spirituality was a common denominator among them all. The study of spirituality is "the study of how basic religious attitudes and values are conditioned by the society within which they occur." 

This cultural construction of spirituality can be vividly seen in the monasteries of medieval Europe, where one of the shaping elements of spirituality was the environment. Spirituality infused all aspects of the monastic environment. At its core, spirituality was an inner, interior phenomenon, one that took place or found fulfillment in the environment of the soul. But this interior environment was influenced by the outer environment in which the body it inhabited dwelt and interacted. Exterior acts and rituals were looked upon as a sign of interior religiosity and devotion. How a religious woman may have interacted with her visual environment, perhaps her prostration beneath a crucifix, was viewed as a reflection of her spiritual devotions and interior meditations. Acoustic aspects of the environment, such as prayers and the liturgy, informed the language with which the women comprehended and communicated their interior experiences. While this study is not the first to investigate these ideas, it may be the first to examine the monastic environment in its totality, instead of focusing on only one area of it. Most work on the connection between spirituality and the environment has explored the visual elements in the lives of religious women. And even when scholars have explored multiple connections, they rarely analyze them at any length.

Dominican Women and Religious Movements in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Of all the religious women in the Middle Ages, Dominican women in particular offer an excellent opportunity to explore relationships between the environment and spirituality. In the thirteenth century, there was a wide-ranging and diverse transformation in European spirituality. Three trends fed into this change. The first was the growing popularity of, and anxiety about, heresy—non-orthodox religious belief not sanctioned by the Christian church. This contributed to the creation of the mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans, who formed to combat the spread of such ideas through their manner of life and the preaching of orthodox beliefs. Mendicancy was a form of religious, itinerant begging that allowed its adherents to interact with the populace, placing them at the centers of medieval life in the newly burgeoning cities. The second trend was a popularization of the concept of apostolic poverty, both among orthodox and heretical Christians, and found at the root of the Dominicans. This concept was based on the idea that the apostles in the New Testament had renounced all their worldly possessions to follow Christ. A large part of the impetus for this reaction to and renunciation of wealth at this time can be found in the growing urban and mercantile centers of Europe, where money and a profit economy had only recently supplanted earlier forms of economic transactions.

 The growth of the middle class, flourishing in the cities and handling money, provoked some anxiety even among that developing class itself. The third trend feeding into the transformation of European spirituality was the growth of what is commonly referred to as the women's religious movement. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a growing number of women embraced a religious way of life, joining already established monastic houses, creating their own quasi-monastic communities, or living by themselves or with a small group of like-minded women as recluses. From these women arose a new type of religious woman, the beguine. These women took temporary vows of chastity, while embracing apostolic poverty and a life of prayer combined with service. The beguines were most prevalent in the Low Countries and along the Rhine River in Germany, but women with similar lifestyles could be found throughout Europe by the thirteenth century. Connected to this movement was a marked increase in the amount of literature directed at religious women by male supervisors, and, most importantly, a sharp increase in the number of texts written by women themselves describing their own spirituality and religious experiences. Among this literature were texts composed by Dominican women. These changes in European spirituality allowed Dominican women to flourish. Of all the new forms of religious life that developed in response to the popular desire for apostolic emulation and reform during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the mendicant orders had perhaps the most lasting impact, although in the beginning there was little that essentially differentiated these groups from other contemporary movements. 

Their interest in preaching, embracing apostolic poverty, living among the urban poor, and combating heresy were not new. The idea of living a mixed religious life, one which combined the active and contemplative forms and devoted one's energy to the service of others, had been first articulated by regular canons in the early twelfth century, and then given various experimental forms by the quasi-heterodox Humiliati and Waldensians, and also by the mulieres sanctae of the Low Countries. However, what distinguished the mendicant orders from these earlier groups was that they were approved by the papacy. Like many previous religious movements that were started by men, the Dominicans quickly gained a following among women, who saw the ideal of apostolic poverty as a means of salvation for themselves and fellow Christians. The men of the Order did not see women as mendicants, but felt that the nature of religious women was to be enclosed in a stable environment—to be monastic. 

The first community founded by Dominic in 1207 had been a house of women in Prouille. While men could preach and celebrate Mass, women were not allowed to do so by the Church. This meant that Dominican women could not partake in one of the primary missions of the Dominican Order—preaching. Additionally, in medieval society unaccompanied and unsupervised women were seen as dangerous, to both themselves and others; so Dominican women were also denied the mendicancy that the men of the Order practiced. To have espoused any other attitude would have been viewed as unnatural. However, what religious women could offer were prayers, for themselves, other Christians, and especially for the male Dominicans who by virtue of their active lives had no time to pray for themselves.

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Download PDF | Helena M. Paavilainen - Medieval Pharmacotherapy Continuity and Change_ Case Studies from Ibn Sina and Some of His Late Medieval Commentarors - 2009.

Download PDF | Helena M. Paavilainen - Medieval Pharmacotherapy Continuity and Change_ Case Studies from Ibn Sina and Some of His Late Medieval Commentarors - 2009.

817 Pages 

INTRODUCTION 

Preliminary Remarks e subject of this study is medical drug therapy in medieval times and the interplay of tradition and innovation that characterize its development. In order to appreciate that development, which began with literate Arabic1 medicine and led to Latin medical scholasticism, we will concentrate on a few diseases2 and follow their treatment methods, starting from an Arabic medical encyclopedia of the th century, proceeding through a number of Arabic and some Latin commentaries, and concluding in the th century. In this way we aim to trace both the continuity and the development of the theory and practice of medieval drug therapy, trying to discover any possible patterns that might have inßuenced the choice of the drugs in therapy, especially why certain drugs were preferred above others. 

is in turn also demands examining in detail the causes and the manifestations of each of the symptoms/syndromes treated and the possible interconnections between these, the given therapeutic theory and the recommended medicaments, establishing the degree of coherence between the di
erent parts of the system.e scope of the study is limited to literary medicine based on the Galenic tradition, especially its drug therapy; this excludes medical folklore and magic on the one hand, and physiotherapy, venesection, and exercise on the other. e starting point is the assumption that the authors of most of these texts were practicing doctors and therefore combined both the theoretical and the practical knowledge of their time. 

In the early chapters we will explore the theoretical background, against which we will then consider the selected diseases and their therapy. In the Þrst chapter we will follow the spread of the Greek medical tradition throughout the area of Arab cultural inßuence to the Latin West and give a short overview of both its theory and practice as found in the texts of the medieval Arab writers. In the second chapter we will look more closely at the particular authors whose texts we shall be discussing; while the third chapter will delineate the methods used. 

the following three chapters, the main body of the work, then discuss three medical conditions: nosebleed, cough and diabetes, as they appear in the medieval medical literature, especially from the therapeutic point of view. e hypotheses to be tested here are that ) Medieval disease and therapy descriptions are internally coherent, and, ) If so, the historical continuity of the use of a drug and its popularity in the therapeutic recommendations of a single medical author correlate both with each other and with other relevant aspects of the medical system, and 3) these correlations occur according to clear patterns, showing that the choice of the drugs was rational. e conclusions drawn about the validity of the hypotheses will be shown in the Þnal chapter. e transliteration of Arabic words follows the system used by the Library of Congress. In the case of Arabic names, the deÞnite article alhas not been capitalized, unless it appears at the beginning of a sentence. Bracketed [ ] material in the translations indicates additions made to the English text for the purpose of intelligibility. 

.. Research Material3 In this book we will concentrate on the type of medicine which was practiced by doctors from the highest to the middle level of the professional scale—literate practitioners, from whose ranks arose also the greatest medical authors of the time, especially the encyclopedists. For material, we have chosen a medieval Arabic medical encyclopedia—Ibn S¯ına’s ¯ Kitab al-Q ¯ an¯ un¯ —and Þve of its commentaries. Commentary literature helps in pursuing a given subject matter and following its development over the centuries, while keeping track both of additions to medical lore over time (i.e., new herbs, prescriptions or theories) and of that which has been omitted from the lore of earlier centuries. 

Two epitomes (or abstracts) will be discussed, in addition to one commentary on an epitome, one fully-ßedged commentary discussing the whole text in detail, and one more glossary-type commentary. Since the epitome genre necessitates drastic condensation, examination of the epitome should clarify which drugs the author really considers to be the most necessary, and possibly, why. e full scholastic commentary genre, on the other hand, o
ers the author the possibility of adding as many innovations as he wants. By comparing these two versions of the texts, it should be possible to determine which were the core drugs (those used by most doctors) amongst all those in the range of drugs used in the Middle Ages for the treatment of a particular disease.4 Ibn S¯ına’s (–) ¯ 5 great medical encyclopedia Kitab al-Q ¯ an¯ un¯ f¯ı al-. tibb was studied in the original Arabic version printed in Beirut (Bayrut [sine anno], reprint of B ¯ ul ¯ aq  H.) and compared with the ¯ Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona (Liber Canonis Avicenne, Venetiis, ). K. al-Qan¯ un¯ is part of the living medical tradition in the Middle East, and thus we considered it appropriate to use the text actually still in use today.6 e commentaries we have used are Mujaz al-Q ¯ an¯ un¯ by Ibn al-Naf¯ıs (d. ),7 Qan¯ unja f ¯ ¯ı al-. tibb by al-Jaghm¯ın¯ı (d. –)8 with its anonymous supracommentary, and the commentaries by Gentile da Foligno (d. )9 and Jacques Despars (d. )10 in Tertius Canonis Avicenne, Venice, 1505.

. Research Method12 e research concentrates on four main questions: . Traditionalism vs. Empiricism, Continuity vs. Change13 Medical historiography oen creates the impression that most early pharmacological writings are the result of mindless copying activity based on excessive reverence for tradition, with no evidence of criticism or possibility for change.14 On the other hand, research studies conducted by Martin Levey and John Riddle stress, respectively, the unobtrusive character of change in medieval medicine through omissions and additions and rationality as a factor impelling change.15 However, at this stage we are not asking the question why changes occurred but simply whether they did occur and to what extent. How much traditional material and how much innovation do the commentaries contain? . e Practical Relationship between Pharmaceutical eory and Practice Here we study Þrst the internal coherence of Ibn S¯ına’s description of ¯ the causes, symptoms and consequences of a particular syndrome and the general theoretical guidelines for therapy, and then the relationship between his pharmacological theory and his practical therapeutic choice of drugs. Ibn S¯ına’s pharmacological theory should dictate the general ¯ type of remedy. We will examine whether this was actually the case or whether the choice of drugs was based on a di
erent system in practice. . Other Factors Inßuencing the Choice of Drugs by Ibn S¯ına and his ¯ Followers Here we will examine the inßuence of Ibn S¯ına’s drug preferences on the ¯ choices of the commentators following him, the possible cause for the need of innovations, and the inßuence of other factors. . Possible Implications Here we will examine the practical conclusions drawn from the relationship of the entire therapeutic system to the objective physical reality. e diseases—or symptoms—of which the treatments are to be studied are nosebleed, cough and diabetes. Nosebleed is an easy-to-observe symptom, with simple theoretical explanation in Kitab al-Q ¯ an¯ un¯ . erefore, we chose its treatment as the model through which we will show the details of the method. Cough represents a far more complicated complex of symptoms, the medieval treatment and etiologic understanding of which was not, however, very distant from our present understanding. Diabetes, on the other hand, was understood in medieval medicine in a radically di
erent manner from the way in which we understand it now, thus o
ering us a realistic example of the challenges connected with medieval pharmacological information. Common to all these symptoms and diseases is the fact that they form unities that can also be understood and treated by modern Western bioscience. None of the main topics of this book—the continuation of medical prescription tradition from the Arabic to the Latin commentary literature,16 the internal coherence of the medical system as seen in individual diseases, and the factors inßuencing the choice of the drugs—have yet been extensively studied. 

e method used includes the following steps: Stage . Describing the Disease (causes, symptoms, consequences) We will describe the disease—or the symptom—as set out in K. alQan¯ un¯ , giving its causes, symptoms and possible consequences, together with their interconnections. 

Stage : Describing the Disease’s Treatment in eory Here we describe the theoretical basis of the drug treatment of a certain disease or symptom, addressing the following questions: What medicinal qualities were recommended, and what qualities did a drug need to have in order to be recommended for therapy of the speciÞc symptom/syndrome?17 What were the e
ects the healer sought?18 Stage : Describing the Practical Treatment Here we will give the prescriptions and drug recommendations laid out by Ibn S¯ına for the disease in question. ¯ Stage : Tallying the Frequency with which Di
erent Drugs Appear in Prescriptions Here we will count how many times each simple drug appears in the prescriptions, thus concluding which of the simple drugs were Ibn S¯ına’s ¯ favorites. Stage : Comparing the Simple Drugs and their Qualities According to Book II of K. al-Qan¯ un¯ Here we will compare the therapeutic qualities of the simple drugs recommended for a particular disease in Book II of K. al-Qan¯ un¯ , together with the list of therapeutic qualities which Ibn S¯ına gave as necessary for ¯ the treatment in his description of the disease’s treatment in theory (Stage ). 

Our intention is to investigate the connection between the choice of drugs and their therapeutic qualities—i.e., to connect theory and practice and to examine how far the theory inßuenced the practical choice of the drug. Stage : Repeating Stages – Using the Various Commentaries Here we describe the same symptoms/syndromes as they appear in the two Arabic commentaries, the Arabic supracommentary and the two Latin commentaries according to Stages  through . ese commentaries are then compared with K. al-Qan¯ un¯ . Stage : Considering Other Rationales behind Ibn S¯ına’s Drug Choices ¯ At this point we move from the perspective of a medieval doctor to that of the modern scholar and seek to evaluate other possible reasons behind the choice of the simple drugs recommended by Ibn S¯ına for the disease ¯ in question. Stage : Seeking Correspondence between the Di
erent Variables Connected with the Choice of the Drugs Here we try to see exactly how the factors possibly connected with the choice of drugs inßuenced this choice, both in K. al-Qan¯ un¯ and in the commentaries, and if they form any regular patterns. e purpose is to Þnd out which criteria are most relevant for the fourth main question addressed here—the possible implications of the research. Stage : Conclusions Here we will discuss the results of Stages –. 

this method has its drawbacks, most of which are connected with the nature of the data. Not all Þelds have yet been studied, and even those researched have not all been examined to the same depth. e identiÞcation of medieval drug names is oen dubious. Diagnoses based on ancient descriptions of syndromes are rarely fully conclusive. e descriptions of both therapy and simple drugs by Ibn S¯ına and the com- ¯ mentators are oen partial and quite unsystematic. erefore one of the key concepts of the method is cumulative evidence: acknowledging that while the data are not—and cannot be—perfect, the sheer weight of evidence can still validate the results. 

 

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Download PDF | April Harper, Caroline Proctor - Medieval Sexuality_ A Casebook - (2007).

Download PDF | April Harper, Caroline Proctor - Medieval Sexuality_ A Casebook - (2007).

241 Pages 

Introduction 

It seems fitting to open this volume by paying tribute to the achievements of Professor Vern L. Bullough, a pioneer in the study of medieval sexuality, who sadly died on June 21, 2006. In fact, it was Bullough’s words that prompted us to hold the conference (Sex: Medieval Perspectives, University of St Andrews, 2004) from which this collection of essays stems. 

In his article “Sex in History: A Redux,” published in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler’s edited volume Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), Bullough recalled his experiences as a historian of sexuality. Following the warning not to publish on the topic until he had achieved success in “a respectable field,” he still faced the embarrassment and disapproval of his colleagues, who introduced him as “a specialist in whores, pimps and queers, who occasionally deigned to do real research.” 

It was his determination in lobbying for sessions on the history of sexuality at the American Historical Association (AHA) conference, attracting an audience of over a thousand people, that motivated other scholars who were likewise devoted to the study of sexuality to push through a session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. A call to action went up to promote the history of sexuality and it was a call many took up. Over the last few decades, the success of this call has been proven as the topic of sexuality has moved from the margins of academic study to the mainstream of current medieval scholarship. Perhaps some of the best testaments to this success are found in the edited collection of articles by Bullough and the respected historian and legal scholar James Brundage, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), a volume which immediately illustrated the breadth of sources and arenas open to the historian of medieval sexuality. 

With the death of Vern Bullough in 2006, the field has lost a great historian of sexuality, a motivating force and mentor. It is, however, encouraging to note, when browsing through this year’s conference program for Kalamazoo, that over 100 papers were given on topics of sexuality by “specialists in whores, pimps and queers.” Increasing numbers of conferences are being held, and books and articles produced, devoted solely to the subject of sexuality.

 We were incredibly fortunate to be given an excellent venue for our conference at St Andrews and enjoyed the great encouragement and support of the Department of Medieval History there, but Bullough’s lone session at the AHA was never far from our minds, for though our conference was occasionally standing-room only as well, we were aware of the struggles we and our colleagues can still face in our field. One delegate informed us that the poster, which had been sent to her particular institution for posting, had, instead, been sent to her directly. Her reputation as a member of the dirty circle of historians of sexuality was obviously known and it was assumed that only she would be interested in such a gathering. Experiences like this made us keenly aware of our position as a third generation of historians of sexuality, both in the continuing challenges we face, but much more so in the freedom we now enjoy. 

It is the hard work of those like Bullough and Brundage in the first generation and the determination of the dozens of scholars who took up the call as a second generation to push open the doors of conferences, publishing houses and university curriculum committees that has made it possible for a third generation of scholars, including ourselves, to hold such conferences, to teach courses on the theme of medieval sexuality and to identify ourselves as historians of sexuality. In our title, we use the term “sexuality” deliberately. 

The conference that inspired our collection was entitled “Sex: Medieval Perspectives” to draw attention to the fact that our focus was not exclusively masculinity, femininity, gender or the study of different sexualities; we wanted to talk about sex. It is a word that is so often deliberately avoided and one that we wanted to emphasize. We realized, however, that “sex” was just as erroneous as any other term we were being pressured to use, for we were interested not only in the act but in how it was perceived, its role in law, literature, societies, cultures and religions, how it shaped the image of men, women, and their roles in society, how it determined the definitions of masculinity, femininity, gender, “normality” and “deviancy.”

 We wanted to explore, as Ruth Mazo Karras has described it in Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, “the universe of meanings that people place on sex acts” (New York: Routledge, 2005, 5). Sexuality is culture; it is representative of a culture’s religion, attitudes, taboos and experience. It is the cultural definitions, ideals and changes in attitudes across time, geographical distance, genre and culture with which this volume is most concerned, and thus we have chosen to title our work Medieval Sexuality to reflect the breadth of our contributors’ work. 

There is a trend for authors to preface their work with an explanation of why the study of sexuality is valid and important. It is a credit to Bullough, Brundage, Murray, Salisbury, Mazo Karras and so many others whose names have become synonymous with the field, and who so eloquently and successfully argued on behalf of the history of sexuality, that we may now make the conscious decision not to begin our work with such a declaration, and can, instead, focus on what Bullough referred to as the “serendipity” of our field. It is chance findings that often inspire or shape our work, and so serendipity is perhaps one of the most fitting descriptions of what it is to study sexuality. What we study as historians of medieval sexuality is gleaned from a huge variety of sources. 

It is often a question of reading between the lines, reading between the sheets. We rely on our own work, trawling through texts and manuscripts for occasional references; we welcome the serendipitous findings of colleagues and students that are so often generously shared and the chance meetings with others working in separate fields but united by our fascination with questions of sexuality. As we looked out across that conference room in St Andrews, we saw an international group of historians, experts in a multiplicity of fields of medieval studies, as well as a large number of young academics and postgraduate students, and we could only conclude that it is indeed serendipitous that we, who might have had little in common in our “real” scholarly pursuits, should share this aspect of our study. 

This shared concern reflects the very nature of the history of sexuality, as Foucault acknowledged when he asserted sexual discourse to be part of a universal experience. Indeed it is the universal, ubiquitous, pervasive nature of sexuality that enables it to touch all our work at some level. The goal of this collection is to reflect that universal serendipity and to draw attention to new findings gleaned from the sources. It seemed timely, a decade on from the publication of Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook, to produce a collection which explores the breadth, scope and impact of current research into medieval sexualities. It is for this reason that we are so delighted to be able to include work both from specialist historians of sexuality and from those newer to the field, written from a variety of perspectives. Included in this volume is a collection of work from scholars of all fields of medieval study, including literature, gender, medicine, political theory, hagiography, historiography, art history, Islamic and Eastern history, whose work contributes to the growth, development and celebration of the history of sexuality. This collection represents just a fraction of the current new research being done on medieval sexualities, and indicates the potential richness of sources yet to be explored. We hope these articles will interest, intrigue, provoke and encourage further research. 

The collection opens with an essay by Ross Balzaretti, a widely published expert in the history of gender and sexuality. His introduction articulates the approaches to sexuality that inform this whole volume. He seeks to open up the sources of Lombard Italy, illustrating clearly how historical and legal texts can be woven together to present us with a clearer picture of early medieval sexualities and society. Dominic Janes, whose research is increasingly focused on modern views of early sexuality, contributes a piece on the reception and historiography of early medieval penitential literature. Both these authors share a concern with gaps and silences in the histories of early medieval sexuality. 

The following section focuses on the pervasive nature of sexuality in the struggles of the holy. Joyce Salisbury, who in 1991 edited the first ever collection of articles on sex in the Middle Ages, takes us back to the desert fathers and mothers, and to their beautifully articulated and resonant personal struggles with sexuality. Sam Riches, art and gender historian, applies notions of gender and sexuality to narratives and images of the hagiographic encounters between saints and monsters. Both these articles negotiate the complexities, and the complex manipulations, of sexual identity. April Harper is also concerned with using gender and sexuality as ways of interpreting medieval sources, particularly Old French literature. She examines a diverse range of sources to elucidate the relationship between food and adulterous women, consumers and the consumed. 

Lynn Martin, long interested in early modern intersections between alcohol and gender, again uses literary sources. His analysis, focused on material from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century, highlights the function of sex and alcohol in male portrayals of unruly women. Finally in this section, Caroline Proctor looks at the way sex, and sexual morality, featured in the careful manipulations of diet and lifestyle recommended in late medieval medical texts. Sexuality and consumption, and their moderation, appear intimately linked in all three of these articles. In the following section, David Santiuste, whose work deals with late medieval English political and historical identities, is also concerned with issues of sexual morality but takes this to a higher political level, scrutinizing the motivations behind Richard III’s Proclamation for the Reform of Morals. Sexual behavior, it seems, could play a central role in the political rhetoric of medieval power struggles. Philip Crispin looks at the political hierarchy reversed. His work on late medieval French theater is channeled here into a consideration of the role sexuality played in the festive drama of the clerks of the Parlement de Paris. 

He suggests that even in this world upside-down, notions of sexuality, and particularly female sexuality, remained conservative. The final section explores the erotic and the exotic frontiers of sexuality in the Middle Ages. Hugh Kennedy, perhaps one of the foremost experts in the history of the medieval Islamic world, turns his attention to a work of Al-Jå˙iΩ and his sexual commentary. The debates in this work are examined as a product of the changing court, but are also compared to an earlier Greek text to illuminate early understandings of sexual orientation and to compare Greek and Arabic cultural attitudes to homosexuality. 

Kim Phillips brings the collection to an end, looking at medieval travel writers and their views of the sexualities they encountered on their travels. Her article shows how pre-colonial descriptions of the peoples of the East did not depend on allegations of sodomy, surprising evidence that allows her to engage with ideas of sexuality, sodomy, colonialism and the other. Her work urges us to see what is not, as well as what is, medieval sexuality.

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