Healthcare in Early Medieval Northern Italy
Healthcare in Early Medieval Northern Italy

Author: Clare Pilsworth

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503528557

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After the fall of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 AD, Northern Italy played a crucial role - both geographically and culturally - in connecting East to West and North to South. Nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in the knowledge and practice of medicine. In sixth-century Ravenna, Greek medical texts were translated into Latin, and medical practitioners such as Anthimus, famous for his work on diet, also travelled from East to West. Despite Northern Italy's location as a confluence of cultures and values, modern scholarship has thus far ignored the extensive range of medical practices in existence throughout this region. This book aims to rectify this absence. It will draw upon both archaeological and written sources to argue for redefinitions of health and illness in relation to the Northern-Italian Middle Ages. This volume does not only put forward new classifications of illness and understandings of diet, but it also demonstrates the centrality of medicine to everyday life in Northern Italy. Using charter evidence and literary sources, the author expands our understanding of the literacy levels and social circles of the elite medical practitioners, the medici, and their lesser counterparts. This work marks a significant intervention into the field of medical studies in the early to high Middle Ages.

Forgotten Healers
Forgotten Healers

Author: Sharon T. Strocchia

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674241746

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Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance. In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe. Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.

Italy and Early Medieval Europe
Italy and Early Medieval Europe

Author: Ross Balzaretti

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0191083267

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A comprehensive survey of recent work in Medieval Italian history and archaeology by an international cast of contributors, arranged within a broader context of studies on other regions and major historical transitions in Europe, c.400 to c.1400CE. Each of the contributors reflect on the contribution made to the field by Chris Wickham, whose own work spans studies based on close archival work, to broad and ambitious statements on economic and social change in the transition from Roman to medieval Europe, and the value of comparing this across time and space.

A Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools
A Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools

Author: Cédric Giraud

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9004410139

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This Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools provides a comprehensive update and new synthesis of the last three decades of research. The fruit of a contemporary renewal of cultural history among international scholars of medieval studies, this collection draws on the discovery of new texts, the progress made in critical attribution, the growing attention given to the conditions surrounding the oral and written dissemination of works, the use of the notion of a “community of learning”, the reinterpretation of the relations between the cloister and the urban school, and links between institutional history and social history. Contributors are: Alexander Andrée, Irene Caiazzo, Cédric Giraud, Frédéric Goubier, Danielle Jacquart, Thierry Kouamé, Constant J. Mews, Ken Pennington, Dominique Poirel, Irène Rosier-Catach, Sita Steckel, Jacques Verger, and Olga Weijers. See inside the book.

Abortion in Early Modern Italy
Abortion in Early Modern Italy

Author: John Christopoulos

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674248090

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A comprehensive history of abortion in Renaissance Italy. In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Drawing on portraits of women who terminated—or were forced to terminate—pregnancies, he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion, despite injunctions from civil and religious authorities. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing medical ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He also explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or didn’t, even when they could have.

England and Rome in the Early Middle Ages
England and Rome in the Early Middle Ages

Author: Francesca Tinti

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503541693

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This volume explores the special connection that linked England and Rome between the seventh and the eleventh centuries, a topic which in spite of its relevance and attraction has never before been dealt with in a publication of this scale and depth. By bringing together scholars from different countries and disciplines and by relying on important recent archaeological findings that have led to a firmer knowledge of early medieval Rome, the volume provides a detailed and integrated investigation of the ways in which contacts between England and the Eternal City developed across the early Middle Ages. With special attention to major themes such as pilgrimage, artistic exchange, and ecclesiastical politics, the essays in this volume show the continuity of the Anglo-Saxons' relations with Rome as well as the ways in which, over time, these adapted to different circumstances. They also show that Anglo-Saxon England should not be thought of as just a passive recipient of influential cultural trends, but rather as an important player in the multi-faceted world of early medieval Europe in which Rome, by now the city of the popes, kept its centrality as a source of spiritual and political power.

Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy
Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy

Author: Caroline Goodson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1108489117

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Demonstrates how food-growing gardens in early medieval cities transformed Roman ideas and economic structures into new, medieval values.

Carolingian Medical Knowledge and Practice, c.775-900
Carolingian Medical Knowledge and Practice, c.775-900

Author: Claire Burridge

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9004466177

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Carolingian Medical Knowledge and Practice explores the practicality and applicability of the medical recipes recorded in early medieval manuscripts. It takes an original, dual approach to these overlooked and understudied texts by not only analysing their practical usability, but by also re-evaluating these writings in the light of osteological evidence. Could those individuals with access to the manuscripts have used them in the context of therapy? And would they have wanted to do so? In asking these questions, this book unpacks longstanding assumptions about the intended purposes of medical texts, offering a new perspective on the relationship between medical knowledge and practice.