The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.

This volume describes the development of Standard English from Middle English onwards.

Nerves and Nerve Injuries is the first comprehensive work devoted to the nerves of the body. An indispensable work for anyone studying the nerves or treating patients with nerve injuries, these books will become the 'go to' resource in the field. The nerves are treated in a systematic manner, discussing details such as their anatomy (both macro- and microscopic), physiology, examination (physical and imaging), pathology, and clinical and surgical interventions. The authors contributing their expertise are international experts on the subject. The books cover topics from detailed nerve anatomy and embryology to cutting-edge knowledge related to treatment, disease and mathematical modeling of the nerves. Nerves and Nerve Injuries Volume 1 focuses on the history of nerves, embryology, anatomy, imaging, and diagnostics. This volume provides a greatly detailed overview of the anatomy of the peripheral and cranial nerves as well as comprehensive details of imaging modalities and diagnostic tests. - Detailed anatomy of the peripheral and cranial nerves including their history and ultrastructure - Comprehensive details of the imaging modalities and diagnostic tests used for viewing and investigating the nerves - Authored by leaders in the field around the globe – the broadest, most expert coverage available

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Introduction giving full explanation of the nature of the corpus and the historical context. This will allow readers to understand the nature of the texts, and to make inferences about how the medical texts which follow might have been used. Notes giving sources and analogues for the recipes in other contemporary European languages (Latin, Middle English, Anglo-Norman). These will allow readers to understand the common theories underlying the recipes and to make judgements about the place of this material within the larger European medical tradition of the time. Comprehensive glossaries. These will allow readers to find any recipe based on the ingredients used in it, or the condition treated, allowing them to compare with recipes in other sources themselves, from other time periods, or investigate the corpus of the way different ingredients were used. Comprehensive plant-name glossary giving evidence for the interpretation of the plant names in the corpus from a series of previously unstudied pre-modern plant-name glossaries. This will allow readers to evaluate the evidence for the interpretation of the plant names and hopefully spur on further research on this neglected topic.

Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 40Medieval translators played an important role in the development and evolution of a scientific lexicon. At a time when most scholars deferred to authority, the translations of canonical texts assumed great importance. Moreover, translation occurred at two levels in the Middle Ages. First, Greek or Arabic texts were translated into the learned language, Latin. Second, Latin texts became source texts themselves, to be translated into the vernaculars as their importance across Europe started to increase.The situation of the respective translators at these two levels was fundamentally different: whereas the former could rely on a long tradition of scientific discourse, the latter had the enormous responsibility of actually developing a scientific vocabulary. The contributions in the present volume investigate both levels, greatly illuminating the emergence of the scientific terminology and concepts that became so fundamental in early modern intellectual discourse. The scientific disciplines covered in the book include, among others, medicine, biology, astronomy, and physics.