Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus, and: A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz by David I. Shyovitz (review)

From Kellie Robertson's excellent and incisive Nature Speaks to these two exciting examinations of religious cultures and the supernatural, 2017 was a year of interrogating the idea of "nature" for the University of Pennsylvania Press. David I. Shyovitz, who discusses the relationship between the supernatural and twelfth- to thirteenth-century Ashkenazi thought, and Zachary A. Matus, who analyzes the influence of Franciscanism on alchemical practice in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, tackle two seemingly unrelated subjects in their books. But, these disparate works are mutually invested in articulating the precise boundaries of medieval understandings of natura, as well as engaging in subtle yet critical revisions of current methodologies in the fields of religion and the history of science.

This latter aim is most prevalent in Shyovitz's groundbreaking book, which begins by setting up the general state of the field to date. He convincingly demonstrates that there exists a scholarly dichotomy between conceptions of medieval Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews that promotes the former as cosmopolitan, rational, and cultured. On the other hand, medieval Ashkenaz has been sidelined in the field because of the prevailing view that the Jews of Northern France and Germany were superstitious, isolated, and ignorant of the surrounding cultural shifts and intellectual developments that accompanied the so-called twelfth-century renaissance in the predominantly Latin Christian West. Though he acknowledges that, recently, scholars have started to break down this stark binary to allow for a more nuanced view of Ashkenaz in the later Middle Ages, the "myth of Sephardic supremacy" continues to dominate the field (4). Against this, Shyovitz proposes a innovative thesis: Rather than consider their emphasis on the supernatural as "backwards" or a sign of their isolationism, scholars should, instead, interrogate the ways in which rabbinical thinkers of medieval Ashkenaz deploy the supernatural to gain a deeper insight into their relationship with the scientific and philosophical developments occurring simultaneously across Europe.

It is this methodology that drives A Remembrance of His Wonders, which sheds new light on the relationship between medieval theologies, understandings of nature and the supernatural, and scientia. By considering the supernatural in this way, Shyovitz persuasively reveals that the workings of the natural world more broadly, and the human body in particular, were critical sites of inquiry for Ashkenazic theologians. Instead of decrying an interest in lycanthropy, wonders, magic, and occult forces as signs of their ignorance, we should view these facets of Ashkenazic thought "as markers of intellectual sophistication, and of integration into a broader European culture that was investing unprecedented energy into investigating the scientific workings and spiritual meaning of its natural surroundings" (3). As part of this novel argument, Shyovitz contends that his investigation indicates that Jewish and Christian thought in medieval Northern Europe was far more integrated than has hitherto been thought. Indeed, A Remembrance of His Wonders argues that "Jewish texts contain detailed knowledge of medieval Christian ideas and doctrines, knowledge that could only have developed from direct exposure to, and overt incorporation of, the developing Christian 'incarnational' world-view that sought theological and devotional meaning in the material, embodied world" (4). Accompanying this argument is an insightful reminder to historians that is reinforced in Zachary Matus' Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: we need to be extremely careful when discussing medieval science. For Shyovitz, this means reconsidering what we consider appropriately scientific. Just because Ashkenazic thinkers weren't rooted in Arisotelian philosophy or the Greek-Arabic tradition, he argues, it doesn't mean that they weren't scientific in their interests and approaches to the natural world. Similarly, our modern scholarly distinction between mysticism and science is flawed...