In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.1 (2000) 105-106



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Medicine and Religion c. 1300:
The Case of Arnau de Vilanova


Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. By Joseph Ziegler (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 342 pp. $80.00

An important corpus of texts--medical, theological, and alchemical--is attached to the name of the Catalan writer Arnau de Vilanova (Arnold of Villanova). As is often the case with important medieval writers, many of these texts are spurious attributions, but those generally considered authentic fall into two basic categories--medical and theological. This book explores the relationship between these two groups of writings. Readers of this journal will welcome the fact that Ziegler's very thesis hinges upon the fusion, rather than disjunction, of the fields encompassing Arnau's activity. Ziegler's clearly expressed purpose is to examine the period when medicine was becoming more thoroughly an institution and a profession, and to assess the degree to which and the freedom with which practitioners of medicine or theology crossed the then developing boundaries between the two. [End Page 105]

The study focuses on Arnau (c. 1238-1311), but elegantly couples this central theme with studies of two contemporaries--Galvano da Levanto (fl. 1300), a Genovese physician, and Giovanni da San Gimignano, a Dominican preacher who frequently used medical metaphor in his sermons. Ziegler uses these latter two characters as "controls" for his study (39). Galvano, as another "theologizing physician," serves to illustrate how typical Arnau's views were among those with medical training. Giovanni, on the other hand, serves as an example of how a theologically centered thinker moved in the medical realm, thus providing the complement to Arnau's movement from the medical to the theological. The book details the language, metaphor, models, and polemic used by these writers, and it reveals how Arnau's thought processes were guided by his medical background and how they manifested themselves in his theological writing. This richly documented study also examines potential conflicts between religion and medicine, and addresses larger issues concerning the place of the physician in late medieval society and culture.

Ziegler finds the medicine-religion boundary in this period to be highly permeable in both directions. Arnau and other "theologizing physicians" like him operated within close parallels between the physical and the mystical body. Arnau's medical knowledge was transferred transumptively from the body of flesh and blood not only to the spiritual body but also to the ecclesiastical body; his role as a reformer paralleled his role as a physician. Language and models find similar deployments in medical and theological writings, and Arnau emphasizes the uniformity of bodily and spiritual health. The preacher Giovanni likewise shows how an expert theologian freely and accurately appropriated even recent, high-level medical authorities for use in sermons. Although Ziegler cautiously notes that a physician like Arnau would be less apt to unify the fields for moralizing purposes than a preacher like Giovanni, his study clearly (and convincingly) argues that the fields of theology and medicine were indeed fused.

Lawrence M. Principe
Johns Hopkins University

...

pdf

Share