Joseph Ziegler – författare

This book takes a fresh look at the cultural role of medicine among learned people around 1300. It was at this time that learned medicine came to be fully incorporated into the academic system and began to win greater social acceptance. Joseph Ziegler argues that physicians and clerics did not confine the role of medicine to its physical therapeutic function, and that fusion rather than disjunction characterized the relationship between medicine and religion at that time. Much of this argument relies on language analysis and on a close study of unedited manuscript sources. By juxtaposing the spiritual writings and the medical output of two learned physicians -- Arnau de Vilanova (c. 1238-1311) and Galvano da Levanto (fl. 1300) -- Dr Ziegler shows that they saw a medical purpose, namely to ensure the spiritual health of their audience and to reveal the mysteries of God and creation. When entering the spiritual realm, both brought to it a medical framework and extended their medical knowledge and curative activities from body to soul. By examining preachers' manuals and sermons, the author suggests that a growing tendency emerged among clerics in general and preachers in particular to appropriate current medical knowledge for spiritual purposes and to substantiate their extensive use of medical metaphors, analogies and exempla by citing specific medical authorities.

Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. In this book, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval concepts of physiognomy, down to the crystallization of attitudes to Indians, Blacks, Jews and Gypsies in the early modern era, they analyse the various routes by which racist ideas travelled before maturing into murderous ideologies in the modern western world. In so doing this book offers a major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.

Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. In this book, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval concepts of physiognomy, down to the crystallization of attitudes to Indians, Blacks, Jews and Gypsies in the early modern era, they analyse the various routes by which racist ideas travelled before maturing into murderous ideologies in the modern western world. In so doing this book offers a major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.

Medicine and religion were intertwined in the middle ages; here are studies of specific instances.The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies. The book reflects the extraordinary advances which 'pure' history of medicine has made in the last twenty years: there is medicine at the levels of midwife and village practitioner, the sweep of the learned Greek and Latin tradition of over a millennium; there is control of midwifery by the priest, therapy through liturgy, medicine as an expression of religious life for heretics, medicine invading theologians' discussion of earthly paradise; and so on.Professor PETER BILLER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York; Dr JOSEPH ZIEGLER teaches in the Department of History at the University of Haifa.Contributors JOSEPH ZIEGLER, PEREGRINE HORDEN, KATHRYNTAGLIA, JESSALYN BIRD, PETER BILLER, DANIELLE JACQUART, MICHAEL McVAUGH, MAAIKE VAN DER LUGT, WILLIAM COURTENAY, VIVIAN NUTTON.

"Septuaginta. Band 16,1: Ezechiel. Mit Einem Nachtrag Von D. Fraenkel".