With 52 poets who wrote between 1160 and 1560, Melancolia poetica brings contemporary English readers into the breadth and depth of the literary consciousness of the vibrant, worldly and imaginative realm of the Italian late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Poetry. MELANCOL�A explores the emotional and psychological landscape of today's mad world. The poems wrestle with loss, despair, love, longing, the challenges of being a father and a husband, the search for identity, and the fight for one's soul. While the collection is not without hope, it resists easy redemption and facile optimism. "Agitations both tender and muscular simmer inside these poems. A sadness that's palpable and physical haunts this poet; so does rage at the power- mongers' forces that keep children hungry, that fester poverty in terrifying mutations. Poet of engagement, Garc�a speaks to the moon, to his sister, to the seasons and the garden, to his body a vessel: 'these hands like a chunk of asteroid-full of taking & giving.' This book offers us a photo-real blueprint of one man's life-space, an elegant blues-print of one man's heart, with direct utterance and lavish music." —Judith Vollmer "Roberto Carlos Garc�a is, it seems to me, poet-kin of both Lorca and Neruda, but also things like rain, wind, the color yellow and the color green. In MELANCOL�A we have a collection of gorgeously quiet poems rendered by intellect and the dream where lyricism is born out of the dusky space between mystery and the everyday. Here is a breathtaking archive of an imagination at work, a body made up of effort and world. See: 'My friends I am not above you // I can hear the song of reckoning in the rose thorns' and 'In my mouth Melancol�a is an orchard, / a yellowing day & bluing night, // In my ribcage Melancol�a is an ecstatic lilt / made of pearls, my heart-wet sand, / pungent as dogwoods.'" —Aracelis Girmay "In these sensuous poems everything is up for inspection and interrogation, including the speaker himself. Here are echoes of Lorca and Neruda, their depth and power, but in a voice entirely the poet's own. Roberto Carlos Garc�a's poems take beauty as a gift, and also as a sometimes foil against capitalism and the numbness of the suburban life we are supposed to desire. '& what is poetry if not what we need?' We need poems like these, with their living language and their vision of where we are and where poetry, ecstatic and elegiac, can take us." —Anne Marie Macari "These poems ache and plead and yearn, and never forget song. Never forget song." —Ross Gay

This book explores how, in the late eleventh century, an Arabic medical compendium was adapted for a Latin-reading audience by Constantine the African and his South Italian colleagues, thus revolutionizing the standard and sophistication of Western medicine.

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

The first of these volumes offers a text of the last and greatest surgical encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (1363); the second analyzes its construction from earlier sources. The text itself covers anatomy and the treatment of wounds, ulcers, fractures, dislocations, and a variety of other conditions and diseases, including not just surgical but medical procedures, which it discusses within a broad framework of medical (physiological and pathological) learning. In the commentary volume, the author's more than 3000 references to older medical authorities are traced to their sources and their use is discussed. 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.

Melancholia is a commonly experienced feeling, and one with a long and fascinating medical history which can be charted back to antiquity. Avoiding the simplistic binary opposition of constructivism and hard realism, this book argues that melancholia was a culture-bound syndrome which thrived in the West because of the structure of Western medicine since the Ancient Greeks, and because of the West's fascination with self-consciousness. While melancholia cannot be equated with modern depression, Matthew Bell argues that concepts from recent depression research can shed light on melancholia. Within a broad historical panorama, Bell focuses on ancient medical writing, especially the little-known but pivotal Rufus of Ephesus, and on the medicine and culture of early modern Europe. Separate chapters are dedicated to issues of gender and cultural difference, and the final chapter offers a survey of melancholia in the arts, explaining the prominence of melancholia - especially in literature.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 "Melancholy" takes us deep inside a painter's fragile consciousness, vulnerable to everything but therefore uniquely able to see its beauty and its light.