Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West brings together eleven papers by leading scholars in ancient and medieval medicine and pharmacy. Fittingly, the volume honors Professor John M. Riddle, one of today's most respected medieval historians, whose career has been devoted to decoding the complexities of early medicine and pharmacy. "Herbs" in the title generally connotes drugs in ancient and medieval times; the essays here discuss interesting aspects of the challenges scholars face as they translate and interpret texts in several older languages. Some of the healers in the volume are named, such as Philotas of Amphissa, Gariopontus, and Constantine the African; many are anonymous and known only from their treatises on drugs and/or medicine. The volume's scope demonstrates the breadth of current research being undertaken in the field, examining both practical medical arts and medical theory from the ancient world into early modern times. It also includes a paper about a cutting-edge Internet-based system for ongoing academic collaboration. The essays in this volume reveal insightful research approaches and highlight new discoveries that will be of interest to the international academic community of classicists, medievalists, and early-modernists because of the scarcity of publications objectively evaluating long-lived traditions that have their origin in the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West brings together eleven papers by leading scholars in ancient and medieval medicine and pharmacy. Fittingly, the volume honors Professor John M. Riddle, one of today's most respected medieval historians, whose career has been devoted to decoding the complexities of early medicine and pharmacy. "Herbs" in the title generally connotes drugs in ancient and medieval times; the essays here discuss interesting aspects of the challenges scholars face as they translate and interpret texts in several older languages. Some of the healers in the volume are named, such as Philotas of Amphissa, Gariopontus, and Constantine the African; many are anonymous and known only from their treatises on drugs and/or medicine. The volume's scope demonstrates the breadth of current research being undertaken in the field, examining both practical medical arts and medical theory from the ancient world into early modern times. It also includes a paper about a cutting-edge Internet-based system for ongoing academic collaboration. The essays in this volume reveal insightful research approaches and highlight new discoveries that will be of interest to the international academic community of classicists, medievalists, and early-modernists because of the scarcity of publications objectively evaluating long-lived traditions that have their origin in the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West brings together eleven papers by leading scholars in ancient and medieval medicine and pharmacy. Fittingly, the volume honors Professor John M. Riddle, one of today's most respected medieval historians, whose career has been devoted to decoding the complexities of early medicine and pharmacy. "Herbs" in the title generally connotes drugs in ancient and medieval times; the essays here discuss interesting aspects of the challenges scholars face as they translate and interpret texts in several older languages. Some of the healers in the volume are named, such as Philotas of Amphissa, Gariopontus, and Constantine the African; many are anonymous and known only from their treatises on drugs and/or medicine. The volume's scope demonstrates the breadth of current research being undertaken in the field, examining both practical medical arts and medical theory from the ancient world into early modern times. It also includes a paper about a cutting-edge Internet-based system for ongoing academic collaboration. The essays in this volume reveal insightful research approaches and highlight new discoveries that will be of interest to the international academic community of classicists, medievalists, and early-modernists because of the scarcity of publications objectively evaluating long-lived traditions that have their origin in the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Provides new ideas to address today's global development challenges, evaluating past experience and exploring answers for the future.

Featured here is a modern translation of a medieval herbal, with a study showing how this technical treatise on herbs was turned into a literary curiosity in the nineteenth century. The contours of this second edition replicate the first; however, it has been revised and updated throughout to reflect new scholarship and new findings. New information is presented on Oswald Cockayne, the nineteenth-century philologist who first translated the Old English medical texts for the modern world. Here the medieval text is read as an example of technical writing (i.e., intended to convey instructions/information), not as literature. The audience it was originally aimed at would know how to diagnose and treat medical conditions and knew or was learning how to follow its instructions. For that reason, while working on the translation, specialists in relevant fields were asked to shed light on its terse wording, for example, herbalists and physicians. Unlike many current studies, this work discusses the Herbarium and other medical texts in Old English as part of a tradition developed throughout early-medieval Europe associated with monasteries and their libraries. The book is intended for scholars in cross-cultural fields; that is, with roots in one field and branches in several, such as nineteenth-century or medieval studies, for historians of herbalism, medicine, pharmacy, botany, and of the Western Middle Ages, broadly and inclusively defined, and for readers interested in the history of herbalism and medicine.

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.

Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

An interdisciplinary collection of papers focussing on infections, chronic illness, and the impact of infectious diseases on medieval society, with contributions by academics from a variety of disciplines and a diverse range of international institutions.

The extensively revised and expanded version of the acclaimed Companion to Chaucer An essential text for both established scholars and those seeking to expand their knowledge of Chaucer studies, A New Companion to Chaucer is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of Chaucer scholarship. Rigorous yet accessible, this book helps readers to identify current debates, recognize historical and literary context, and to understand how particular concepts and theories affect the interpretation of Chaucer’s texts. Chaucer specialists from around the globe offer contributions that range from updates of long-standing scholarship on biography, language, women, and social structures, to original research in new areas such as ideology, the afterlife, patronage, and sexuality. In presenting conflicting perspectives and ideological differences, this stimulating volume encourages readers to explore additional paths of inquiry and engage in lively and informed debate. Each chapter of the Companion, organized by issues and themes, balances textual analysis and cultural context by grounding the reader in existing scholarship. Key issues from specific passages are discussed with an annotated bibliography provided for reference and further reading. Compiled with all students of Chaucer in mind, this important volume: Presents contributions from both established and emerging specialists Explores the circumstances in which Chaucer wrote, such as the political and religious issues of his time Includes numerous close readings of selected poems Provides points of entry to a wide range of approaches to Chaucer’s works Incorporates original research, fresh perspectives, and updated additions to Chaucer scholarship A New Companion to Chaucer is a valuable and enduring resource for scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature and medieval studies, as well as the general reader interested in interpretations and historical contexts of Chaucer’s writings.

In the period just prior to medicine's modernity—before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, the centralized regulation of medical practice, and the valorization of scientific empiricism—England was the scene of a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the emergence of printed English books a century and a quarter later, thousands of discrete medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. These widely varied texts shared a model of a universe crisscrossed with physical forces and a picture of the human body as a changeable, composite thing, tuned materially to the world's vicissitudes. According to Julie Orlemanski, when writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik—the language of humors and complexions, leprous pustules and love sickness, regimen and pharmacopeia—they did so to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. Orlemanski explores the texts of her vernacular writers to show how they deployed the rich terminology of embodiment and its ailments to portray symptomatic figures who struggled to control both their bodies and the interpretations that gave their bodies meaning. As medical paradigms mingled with penitential, miraculous, and socially symbolic systems, these texts demanded that a growing number of readers negotiate the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Examining both the medical writings of late medieval England and the narrative and poetic works that responded to them, Symptomatic Subjects illuminates the period's conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean.