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

Joseph Ziegler. Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. Oxford Historical Monographs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. x + 342 pp. $80.00.

Without saying as much, this book invites us to think again whether, by distinguishing between the seemingly "medical" and the seemingly "religious," we can legitimately discount the religious component in our history of medieval medicine. With careful argumentation based upon extensive textual evidence, Ziegler convincingly demonstrates that although fourteenth-century medicine and theology constituted distinct domains, they were connected in many complex ways. Indeed, so intimate was this connection that we cannot properly appreciate the medical writings of theologically minded authors without taking their religious utterances seriously as well.

Ziegler's argument is based primarily on his study of the writings of Arnau de Vilanova. Despite the wealth of scholarship that has been devoted to this important figure, Ziegler is the first to show how two dominant aspects of Arnau's life--his involvement in theological controversy and his medical pursuits--come together in a believable characterization. Hitherto, it was possible to read studies of Arnau's medical writings without ever realizing that this figure was also at the center of a series of theological disputes that brought him into conflict with the church hierarchy and the doctors of the Sorbonne. Ziegler, however, enlarges our view by revealing the interpenetrable nature of this "theologizing" physician's medical and theological beliefs.

In demonstrating the "fusion" of Arnau's medical and spiritual thought, Ziegler uses linguistic analysis to show how Arnau's theological speculations were shaped and supported by his medical knowledge. In his religious works Arnau uses extensive technical medical imagery to draw analogies between the physical and spiritual realms. For example, descriptions of how the body evacuates malignant humors serve as metaphors for how the mystical body of the church should purge itself of harmful members. In effect, medical knowledge of the physical body is used as the starting point for the discussion of spiritual matters. Ziegler also reveals how Arnau's religious thinking influenced his view of medicine. Even though his medical writings lack any religious allusions, he regarded physicians as divinely appointed agents of divinely ordained knowledge who, through the exercise of charity, cured the body as preparation for curing the soul.

Ziegler constructs his argument in judicious fashion. To test his conclusions about the relationship between Arnau's medical and theological thinking, he develops two "controls": one is the Genoese physician Galvano da Levanto, who, like Arnau, showed a keen interest in theological matters, and who also incorporated much of his medical knowledge into his religious writings; the other is the Dominican author Giovanni da San Gimignano, a cleric who had no professional medical background, yet whose theological works reveal a considerable knowledge of medicine. Like Arnau, Galvano uses medical knowledge as a springboard for theological speculation; but whereas Arnau draws upon medical themes as exemplars in his theology, Galvano moralizes extensively, giving detailed theological interpretations of each part of the human body. Giovanni's writings, by contrast, incorporate a much "higher level" use of medical language. By providing detailed medical information together with numerous citations to medical authors, Giovanni shows clerics how to construct elaborate medical metaphors for use in sermons.

Galvano's and Giovanni's writings provide Ziegler with much more than a check on what he says about Arnau. His analysis of their works, together with his examination of contemporary sermon literature and the standard encyclopedias of the period, enable him to draw much broader conclusions about the general relationship between medicine and religion at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Most notable is his well-substantiated observation that the use to which medical knowledge was put in theological discourse is an important indicator of the wider cultural role that medicine played at a time when university medicine was beginning to win greater...