Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean
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Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean is a series devoted to all aspects of medicine in the (Eastern) Mediterranean area during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (3rd/4th centuries to the 16th). Though with a clear focus on Greek (Byzantine) medicine, it also includes the contributions of the cultures that were present or emerged in the area during the Middle Ages and after, and which interacted with Byzantium (e.g. the Syrian and Arabic worlds, Jewish and Slavic cultures, Turkish peoples, particularly the Ottomans, and Coptic communities).
Medicine is understood in a broad sense: not only medical theory, but also the health conditions of people, nosology and epidemiology, the economy of health, and the non-conventional forms of medicine, that is, all the spectrum of activities dealing with human health. The series publishes the results of cutting-edge research, so providing a wide range of scholarly and scientific fields with new data for further explorations.
The series has been launched in 2010 by Ashgate with a volume on a bioarchaeological study of Byzantine Crete (7th-12th cent.). Since then it has published critical editions with commentary of texts as different as the Arabic and Latin translations of classical medical and scientific treatises, a recent iatrosofion, and hospital manuals, in addition to studies on medieval herbalism and a Census of Greek Medical Manuscripts. In 2016 it was published by Routledge.
Series Editor:
Alain Touwaide, Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, DC, and Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard, University, Washington, USA.
For over 40 years, Alain Touwaide has studied the production and diffusion of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge across the eastern Mediterranean world with a particular focus on the Byzantine Empire and its neighbors. Originally a Classicist, he is interested in transcultural processes and the medico-scientific analysis of ancient knowledge.
Associate Editor:
Isabel Grimm-Stadelmann, Privatdozentin Dr. habil. Dr. phil., Institute for Ethics, History and Theory of Medicine, LMU Munich.
Scientific Committee:
Siam Bhayro, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Professor of Semitic Languages and Jewish Studies.
Carmen Caballero Navas, Department of Semitic Studies, Faculty of Arts, Women's and Gender Studies Institute, University of Granada.
Ciro Giacomelli, Università degli Studi di Padova, Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell’Antichità – DiSSGeA.
Dimitri Gutas, Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic studies, Yale University, works on the medieval transmission and translation of Greek philosophy and science into Arabic and on Arabic philosophy.
Maria Mavroudi, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, specializes in Byzantium and the Arabs; bilinguals in the Middle Ages; Byzantine and Islamic science; the ancient tradition between Byzantium and Islam; Byzantine intellectual history; survival and transformation of Byzantine culture after 1453.
Gerasimos Merianos, Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. Senior Researcher, Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens.
Filippo Ronconi, Directeur d’études at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) of Paris, works on ancient and medieval Greek and Latin manuscripts. He focuses on bibliology, codicology, paleography and on textual transmission.
Building on a broad critical editing and analysis of Arabic and Latin texts, this book traces a new history of leprosy moving from late antiquity to the Islamic and Latin Middle Ages, thus proving the necessity of a comparative approach to grasp its Mediterranean scope. Challenging established historical reconstructions, this study demonstrates that Arabic texts were familiar with a scientific approach to contagiousness. It also shows how, when faced with the diffusion of leprosy as an endemic disease, Latin physicians tried to solve the enigma of its nature avoiding any moral censorship. Each chapter includes the relevant texts, all related to al-Maǧūsī’s encyclopedia Kitāb al-Malakī (10th c.), in critical edition with an English translation.
The book aims to contribute historians from different areas with a realistic picture of how theoretical, learned medicine considered leprosy, opening the possibility of broader research on other sources.
The lack of reliable demographic data for Byzantine cities raises questions as to the actual rate of expansion and mortality of plague. This essentially leads to the question of change and progress of the nature of infectious diseases in that period. Also, the analysis of the written sources raised a series of questions, mainly epidemiological in nature: the entry points and spreading of the disease in the Mediterranean, the epidemic dynamics as well as the evolution of the microbial agent of plague, i.e. Yersinia pestis.
The present study offers a substantial explanation for the outbreaks of plague that struck Byzantium by exploring the multiple factors that caused or triggered epidemics. The study covers the entire period extending from the beginning of the Byzantine Empire until its fall in 1453, which was marked by two major pandemics, namely the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death. All known primary sources were collected and grouped from a spatiotemporal perspective, so as to retrace the unfolding of the two pandemics. The focus of the research shifts from known historical frameworks to ones of human activities, endemic foci and natural environment of the era as risk factors of the outbreaks.
