24.See discussion here: Justin K. Stearns, Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 41–3 and passim.
25.Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically About Medieval Emotions,” History Compass 8.8 (2010): 828–42.
26.Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–32.
27.A few recent examples include Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: Brill, 2013), Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music, and Medicine, eds. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
28.Aquinas’ treatise on the passions is found in the Summa Theologica, II–I, q. 22–48. See also Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
29.See, for example, Richard Newhauser, “The Love of Money as Deadly Sin and Deadly Disease,” in Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 315–26; Bonnie Kent “On the Track of Lust: Luxuria, Ockham, and the Scientists,” in In the Garden of Evil, ed. Newhauser, pp. 349–70; Elena Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection,” in Emotions and Health, ed. Carrera, pp. 94–146.
30.In 1229, Bishop William of Blois decreed that priests instruct the faithful on the seven deadly sins in confession. However, further statutes also indicate the utility of preaching in this matter. H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 204.
31.Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’” Speculum 17.2 (1942), pp. 226–42.
32.Notably, Johan Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978–1982). While charting the ascent of the renaissance and of civilization, Jacob Burckhardt also characterizes the mentality of the Middle Ages as “childish.” Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 106.
33.Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), p. 5.
34.Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 13–43.
35.The work on French sources is surveyed by Bruno Tabuteau, “Historical Research Developments on Leprosy in France,” The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 41–56, (p. 44).
36.Court Appeals of the State of New York, “People v Pierson,” 68 N.E, 243 (N.Y. 2003). Accessed 8 October 2014.
37.For more on this case in American case law history, see Catharine Cookson, Regulating Religion: the Courts and the Free Exercise Clause (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 155–164; Catherine W. Laughran, “Religious Beliefs and the Criminal Justice System: Some Problems of Faith Healing,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 8 (1975): 396–431; and Leslie C. Griffin, “Religion and the Courts, 1790–1947,” in Cambridge History of Religions in America, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 832–52.
38.Michael R. McVaugh, “Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71 (1997), pp. 201–223 (p. 117).
39.Darrel W. Amundsen, “Casuistry and the Professional Obligations: the Regulation of Physicians by the Court of Conscience in the Late Middle Ages,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 3 (1981): 22–37.
40.Rebecca Solnit, “The Separating Sickness: How Leprosy Teaches Empathy,” Harper’s Magazine June 2013: 50–7.
41.Amber Hildebrandt, “Ebola Outbreak: Why Liberia’s Quarantine in West Point Slum Will Fail,” CBC News. 15 August 2014. Accessed 8 October 2014
42.Sarah Larimer, “Police, Residents Clash in Liberian Slum under Ebola Quarantine,” The Washington Post. 20 August 2014. Accessed 8 October 2014
See, also, Monica H. Green, “The Black Death and Ebola: On the Value of Comparison,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica H. Green (Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Medieval Press, 2015), pp. ix–xx.
43.“The abiding conviction from antiquity through modernity that physical diseases and mental illnesses are the result of excessive or immoderate behaviors and moral depravity or sin is suggestive of the stubborn persistence of these literary and cultural misreadings of the body and mind that still plague us today.” Jennifer C. Vaught, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), p. 6.
44.Yet some modern medical researchers have argued for the potential benefits for modern medicine of putting medieval medical prescriptions to the test in modern labs to determine their efficacy. Bart K. Holland, ed. Prospecting for Drugs in Ancient and Medieval European Texts: A Scientific Approach (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996). Recently, an Anglo-Saxon recipe for stye infections was found to cure MRSA (staph infection). Sarah Knapton, “Anglo-Saxon Cow Bile and Garlic Potion Cures MRSA,” The Telegraph. 30 March 2015. Accessed 23 January 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11504166/Anglo-Saxon-cow-bile-and-garlic-potion-kills-MRSA.html.
45.Anne Van Arsdall, “Challenging the ’Eye of Newt’ Image of Medieval Medicine,” in The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Alderhot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 195–205 (p. 198).
46.For an introduction to Galenic medicine, see R. J. Hankinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
47.For a comparison of the meaning of these six non-naturals in earlier medicine and our own, see L. H. Curth, “Lessons from the Past: Preventative Medicine in Early Modern England,” Medical Humanities 29 (2003): 16–20.
48.Kocku Von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 140.
49.Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2010), p. 6.
50.Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy, p. 7.
51.Ibid., p. 50. Scholars disagree as to the impact of the condemnation upon the subsequent direction of science and philosophy. This debate is summarized by Kent Emery and Andreas Speer, “After the Condemnation of 1277: New Evidence, New Perspectives, and Grounds for New Interpretations,” in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277. Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrunderts. Studien und Texte / After the Condemnation of 1277. Philosophy and Theology at the University of Paris in the Last Quarter of the Thirteenth Century. Studies and Texts, eds. Jan. A. Aertsen, Kent Emery and Andreas Speer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 3–19 (pp. 1–11).
52.Ibid., p. 54.
53.Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Bollingen, 1953), p. 13.
54.Joseph Ziegler, Medicine an
d Religion c.1300: the Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
55.As an example of the former, see Jeremy Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and as examples of the latter, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Polity, 1990) and most recently Marion Turner, “Illness Narratives in the Later Middle Ages: Arderne, Chaucer, and Hoccleve,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.1 (2016): 61–87.
56.Luise Elizabeth Wilson, “Miracle and Medicine: Conceptions of Medical Knowledge and Practice,” in Wounds in the Middle Ages, eds. Anne and Cordelia Warr (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 63–86.
57.Joseph Ziegler, “Practitioners and Saints: Medical Men in Canonization Processes in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries,” Social History of Medicine 12.2 (1999): 191–225.
58.“Canon 22,” found in Disciplinary Decrees of the General Council, ed. Henry J. Schroeder (St. Louis: Herder, 1957), p. 236.
59.Ibid., p. 236.
60.“quia secundum constitutionem generalis concilii no debet aliquis medicus curare egrotum vel dare ei aliquam medicinam nisi prius bene confessus fuerit, quia sicut dicit Hieronimus, ex flagello dei vel etiam diaboli multe nascuntur egritudines sine natura elementorum vel corporum, et tales egritudines quas homo patitur pro peccatis suis non possunt curari sine confessione et penitentia.” Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, ed. Frederick Broomfield (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1968), p. 236. More than 100 manuscripts of this text survive as well as at least two printed editions from the 1480s. See also Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2012), p. 33.
61.Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy, pp. 27–8.
62.Faye Marie Getz, “The Medical Faculty Before 1500,” in The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. 2: Late Medieval Oxford, eds. J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 374–405.
63.Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, pp. 7–8.
64.Getz, “The Medical Faculty Before 1500.”
65.“Surgery,” in Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: an Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven John Livesey and Faith Wallis (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 464–67. Knowledge and practice overlapped in the various divisions of medical practitioners, but notions of hierarchical social status are documented by Vern L. Bullough, “Status and Medieval Medicine,” Journal of Health and Human Behavior 2 (1961): 204–210, and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge & Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 179.
66.Linda E. Voigts and Michael R. McVaugh, “A Latin Technical Phlebotomy,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74.2 (1984): 1–69 (p. 13).
67.Grigsby, “The Social Position of the Surgeon,” p. 75.
68.Virginia Langum, “Discerning Skin: Complexion, Surgery, and Language in Medieval Confession,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Culture, ed. Katie L. Walter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 141–60.
69.Carole Rawcliffe, The Hospitals of Medieval Norwich (Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1995); Medicine for the Soul: the Life, Death and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital, St. Giles, Norwich, c. 1249–1550 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999).
70.M. Claire Jones, “Vernacular Literacy in Late-Medieval England: the Example of East Anglian Medical Manuscripts,” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2000).
71.Getz, “Charity, Translation and the Language of Medical Learning,” p. 3.
72. The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS o.s. 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 51. This English text is based on the French La Somme le Roi. Although there are only three extant manuscripts of this translation, La Somme le Roi was an extremely popular text and exists in multiple English translations. See Leo M. Carruthers, La Somme le Roi et Ses Traductions Anglaises: Étude Comparée (Paris: Association Des Médiévistes Anglicistes De L’Enseignement Supérieur, 1986).
73. The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 51.
74.For exempla of this type, see Frederich C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum: a Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969) p. 127, item 1554 and p. 290, item 3759.
75.Worcester Cathedral MS. F. 10 ff.289rb-291va, ed. and trans. by Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 323–329.
76.Bloomfield offers the most comprehensive account of their history. Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: an Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952).
77.Ibid., p. 72.
78.Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
79.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Dominican House of Studies.
80.See Michael Kuczynski, “Sin and the Vices in the Middle English Mystics,” in the Garden of Evil, ed. Newhauser, pp. 206–33 (p. 208).
81.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–I, q. 88, 89.
82.Wenzel, “Preaching the Seven Deadly Sins,” pp. 145–69.
83.Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic,” pp. 214–234.
84.Ibid., pp. 228–9. See also Robert James Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), who claims “we should not underestimate the significance of this paradigm shift” (p. 36).
85.Richard Newhauser, “‘These Seaven Devils’: The Capital Vices on the Way to Modernity,” in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds. Newhauser and Ridyard, pp. 157–88.
86.Richard Newhauser, “Capital Vices as Medieval Anthropology” in Laster im Mittelalter: Vices in the Middle Ages, eds. Christoph Flüeler and Martin Rohde (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 105–124.
87.Although the majority of texts used in this study date from 1215 to about 1500, some earlier religious and medical texts are cited for context.
88.Robbins lists 11 copies of John Arderne’s Practica in Middle English (of which there are four separate translations), the first dating from the late fourteenth century. Rossell Hope Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English,” Speculum 45 (1970): 393–415 (p. 406); Jones, “Four Middle English Translations,” pp. 61–89. Among the most popular surgical texts translated into Middle English are those by Guy de Chauliac, Lanfranc of Milan and John Arderne. Robbins lists eight extant copies of Lanfranc’s surgical manual and seven copies of Guy de Chauliac’s text (of which there are two complete separate translations and two incomplete translations). Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts,” p. 406.
89.Many texts related to plague are helpfully edited and translated by Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
90.I prefer Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum to Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius on the grounds of citation and circulation in the Middle Ages. Vincent’s enormous work was largely known through compilations, namely De Proprietatibus Rerum. For its contemporary authority, see Michael Twomey, “Towards a Reception History of Western Mediaeval Encyclopedias in England Before 1500,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 329–62. Twomey concludes, “Bartholomaeus’ encyclopedia is far and away the encyclopedia of choice … with Vincent’s Speculum a distant second” (p. 362). The Latin encyclopedia was extremely popular in manuscript and early printed book form. Translated into several vernacular languages, the text was rendered into English by John Trevisa in 1398. There are at least eight extant manuscripts of this translation. A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Text of John Trevisa’s Translation
of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum,’ Text 15 (2003): 83–96, (p. 85).
Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture Page 4
