This collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical
advances in scholarship on death and disease, across and beyond the
pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing
traditions.
Across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic
and Jewish healing traditions shared inherited medical paradigms
containing similar healthy living precepts and attitudes toward body,
illness and mortality. Yet, as the chapters collected here demonstrate,
customs of diagnosing, explaining and coping with disease and death
often diverged with respect to knowledge and practice.
Offering a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad selection of
material emerging from England to the Persian Gulf, the volume reaches
across conventional disciplinary and historiographical boundaries.
Plague diagnoses in pre-Black Death Arabic medical texts, rare,
illustrated phlebotomy instructions for plague patients, and a Jewish
plague tract utilising the Torah as medicine reflect critical
re-examinations of primary sources long thought to have nothing new to
offer. Novel re-interpretations of Giovanni Villani's "New Chronicle",
canonisation inquests and saints' lives offer fresh considerations of
medieval constructions of epidemics, disabilities, and the interplay
between secular and spiritual healing. Cross-disciplinary perspectives
recast late medieval post-mortem diagnoses in Milan as a juridical -
rather than strictly medical - practice, highlight the aural
performativity of the Franciscan deathbed liturgy, explore the long
evolution of lapidary treatments for paediatric and obstetric diseases
and thrust us into the Ottoman polychromatic sensory world of disease
and death. Finally, considerations of the contributions of modern
science alongside historical primary sources generates important new
ways to understand death and disease in the past. Overall, the
contributions juxtapose and interlace similarities and differences in
their local and historical contexts, while highlighting and nuancing
some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and
disease - two historiographical subfields long approached separately.
