"Volume 1 ... contains the complete text of Guy's Inventarium; volume 2 will contain a commentary on the text"--P. viii.

"Volume 1 ... contains the complete text of Guy's Inventarium; volume 2 2will contain a commentary on the text"--P. viii.

"Bold, deeply learned, and important, offering a provocative thesis that is worked out through legal and archival materials and in subtle and original readings of literary texts. Absolutely new in content and significantly innovative in methodology and argument, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind offers a cultural geography of medieval blindness that invites us to be more discriminating about how we think of geographies of disability today." ---Christopher Baswell, Columbia University "A challenging, interesting, and timely book that is also very well written . . . Wheatley has researched and brought together a leitmotiv that I never would have guessed was so pervasive, so intriguing, so worthy of a book." ---Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind presents the first comprehensive exploration of a disability in the Middle Ages, drawing on the literature, history, art history, and religious discourse of England and France. It relates current theories of disability to the cultural and institutional constructions of blindness in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, examining the surprising differences in the treatment of blind people and the responses to blindness in these two countries. The book shows that pernicious attitudes about blindness were partially offset by innovations and ameliorations---social; literary; and, to an extent, medical---that began to foster a fuller understanding and acceptance of blindness. A number of practices and institutions in France, both positive and negative---blinding as punishment, the foundation of hospices for the blind, and some medical treatment---resulted in not only attitudes that commodified human sight but also inhumane satire against the blind in French literature, both secular and religious. Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England differed markedly in all three of these areas, and the less prominent position of blind people in society resulted in noticeably fewer cruel representations in literature. This book will interest students of literature, history, art history, and religion because it will provide clear contexts for considering any medieval artifact relating to blindness---a literary text, a historical document, a theological treatise, or a work of art. For some readers, the book will serve as an introduction to the field of disability studies, an area of increasing interest both within and outside of the academy. Edward Wheatley is Surtz Professor of Medieval Literature at Loyola University, Chicago.

This commentary on the last and greatest surgical encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (1363) analyzes its construction from earlier sources. The author's more than 3000 references to older medical authorities are traced to their sources and their use is discussed. The companion volume presents the text itself, which covers anatomy and the treatment of wounds, ulcers, fractures, dislocations, and a variety of other conditions and diseases, discussed within a broad framework of medical (physiological and pathological) learning. Together, the volumes illuminate the culmination of medieval surgery and its techniques in an academic setting and furnish a kind of chrestomathy of the whole range of literature known and cited in medieval medical faculties.

This edited volume draws historians and anthropologists together to explore the contested worlds of epidemic corpses and their disposal. Why are burials so frequently at the center of disagreement, recrimination and protest during epidemics? Why are the human corpses produced in the course of infectious disease outbreaks seen as dangerous, not just to the living, but also to the continued existence of society and civilization? Examining cases from the Black Death to Ebola, contributors challenge the predominant idea that a single, universal framework of contagion can explain the political, social and cultural importance and impact of the epidemic corpse.

‘Prosthesis’ denotes a rhetorical ‘addition’ to a pre-existing ‘beginning’, a ‘replacement’ for that which is ‘defective or absent’, a technological mode of ‘correction’ that reveals a history of corporeal and psychic discontent. Recent scholarship has given weight to these multiple meanings of ‘prosthesis’ as tools of analysis for literary and cultural criticism. The study of pre-modern prosthesis, however, often registers as an absence in contemporary critical discourse. This collection seeks to redress this omission, reconsidering the history of prosthesis and its implications for contemporary critical responses to, and uses of, it. The book demonstrates the significance of notions of prosthesis in medieval and early modern theological debate, Reformation controversy, and medical discourse and practice. It also tracks its importance for imaginings of community and of the relationship of self and other, as performed on the stage, expressed in poetry, charms, exemplary and devotional literature, and as fought over in the documents of religious and cultural change. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book engages with contemporary critical and cultural theory and philosophy, genre theory, literary history, disability studies, and medical humanities, establishing prosthesis as a richly productive analytical tool in the pre-modern, as well as the modern, context. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Textual Practice journal.

A new history of the medieval illustrations that birthed modern anatomy. This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.

This book presents an engaging, detailed portrait of the people, ideas, and beliefs that made up the world of English medieval medicine between 750 and 1450, a time when medical practice extended far beyond modern definitions. The institutions of court, church, university, and hospital--which would eventually work to separate medical practice from other duties--had barely begun to exert an influence in medieval England, writes Faye Getz. Sufferers could seek healing from men and women of all social ranks, and the healing could encompass spiritual, legal, and philosophical as well as bodily concerns. Here the author presents an account of practitioners (English Christians, Jews, and foreigners), of medical works written by the English, of the emerging legal and institutional world of medicine, and of the medical ideals present among the educated and social elite. How medical learning gained for itself an audience is the central argument of this book, but the journey, as Getz shows, was an intricate one. Along the way, the reader encounters the magistrates of London, who confiscate a bag said by its owner to contain a human head capable of learning to speak, and learned clerical practitioners who advise people on how best to remain healthy or die a good death. Islamic medical ideas as well as the poetry of Chaucer come under scrutiny. Among the remnants of this far distant medical past, anyone may find something to amuse and something to admire.

This book examines the two chief anatomical and physiological embodi-ment theories of voluntary animal motion, which I call the cardiosinew and cerebroneuromuscular theories of motion, from the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) to that of Mondino (d. A.D. 1326). The study of animal motion commenced with the ancient Greek natural scientist Aristotle who wrote the monograph 'On the motion of animals' (De motu animalium). Subsequent inquiries into voluntary animal motion may be found in a variety of Greek, Latin, and Arabic compendia, commentaries, and encyclopedias throughout the ancient and medieval periods. The motion of animals was considered relevant to natural philosophers and theologians investigating the nature of the soul, and to physicians seeking to discover the causes of disorders of voluntary movement such as epilepsy and tetany. The book fills a gap in the scholarly literature concerned with pre-modern studies of the anatomical and physiological mechanisms of will and bodily movement. The accompanying photographs of my own anatomical dissections illuminate ancient and medieval conceptual, empirical, and experimental methods of anatomical and physiological research.