CFA PhD Scholarship, Ghent University, Department of Literary Studies. Supervisor Prof. Dr. Teodoro Katinis (original) (raw)
Project's abstract: How are rhetoric and medicine combined in the early modern Italian literature? What role does the vernacular play? Which is the legacy of this literature? This project will contribute to answer to these questions by focusing on the widespread literature of Secreti (books of secrets), which was a popular genre of medical texts that peaked in Italy between 1550 and 1600 and aimed at providing the readers of any social class, gender, or age with an encyclopedic compendium of the medical knowledge for self-healing and preservation. These books collect medical remedies to cure any kind of illness and imperfection using also magic, astrology and alchemy. The authors of these texts (Alessio Piemontese, Leonardo Fioravanti and Isabella Cortesi, among others) gather, organize and convey in the vernacular a paramount knowledge on how to defeat epidemies, poisons and other common diseases. The PhD student will study the rhetorical strategies and the use of vernacular in the 16-century books of secrets with a focus on the UGent Library's collection.
Related papers
2010
This article, the second part of a two-part essay on the sources and reception of Manfredi’s work, examines the relationship between the Liber de homine (Il Perché) written by Girolamo Manfredi and the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum. It accounts for the success of the Liber de homine (Il Perché) in Italian and Iberian contexts, analysing twenty-six Italian editions produced from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, as well as the only two existing translations, one printed in Catalan (1499) and the other in Spanish (1567, followed by four reprints in the sixteenth century). The existence of the Catalan translation was discovered in 2001 by the authors of this article. The Catalan and Spanish translations do not depend upon each other; moreover, the printed editions exemplify the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century circulation of medical texts in vernacular languages.
Early Vernacular Medical Advice Books and Their Popular Appeal in Early Modern Italy, pp. 264-303.
Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 36:2, 2021
Abstract: The essay considers the explosion of medical advice publications in the vernacular that characterises the first two centuries of printing, and in particular their chronology and the different textual genres that made up this literature in early modern Italy. It shows that, in spite of the almost exclusive focus on recipe books in recent scholarship, the composition of this literature was much more varied and regimens of health, food regimens, books about the medicinal properties of naturalia, and compendia of medical information of various kinds (diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic) matched and sometimes exceeded the fortune of recipe books. It then goes on to ask what made some vernacular medical advice books particularly appealing to a wide non-professional and non-Latinate audience, while apparently similar publications attracted little interest. To this end it pays unprecedented attention to the full range of elements that determined the appeal of a book: its physical and typographical features, its contents and implicit functions, its author, patron, publisher and geographical reach.
2011
The large number of diverse medical texts shows that therapeutic matters were of major concern to medieval people. The division of medical texts into the learned tradition, which includes practical or philosophical treatises written in Latin, and the remedy-book genre, which includes the materia medica tradition1 written in various vernaculars, is well-established. However, genres do overlap, and the relationship between Latin and vernacular is more complex than that.2 This article considers cultural and linguistic diversity through a collection of thirteenth-century remedies written mainly in Occitan but containing multilingual elements, from individual words and letters in Latin, Hebrew and
Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation , 2009
Included in the original publication are translations of the following texts: I. Biography of Constantine the African by Peter the Deacon (12th cent.) II. Trota (?), obstetrical excerpts from the Salernitan Compendium, On the Treatment of Diseases (12th cent.) III. Mattheus Platearius (attributed), Circa instans (12th cent.; excerpts) IV. Copho (attributed), Anatomy of the Pig (12th cent.) V. Medical Licenses from the Kingdom of Naples a) License for Bernard of Casale Santa Maria (1330) b) License to practice surgery for Maria Incarnata (1343)
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
La ‘Collectio Salernitana’ di Salvatore De Renzi, ed. Danielle Jacquart and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 3 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 2008