The Image of Disease in Religious, Medical-Astrological and Social Discourses: Old Polish Literature as an Example of Early Modern European Mentality.

Today, the world is struggling with a coronavirus epidemic. People explain differently the causes and sense of this disease. Old Polish literature about diseases is representative for European thought in the modern era. The problem of the disease appears in old Polish literature in various discourses. The three most important are religious, medical-astrological and social discourse. In this article, I discuss basic paradigms of thinking connected with these discourses and the relationship between them. In the religious discourse, it is God who decides about health and illness. The pathological state of the organism can be both a trial and a punishment for the sinner. The medical and astrological discourse is based on ancient medicine, medieval medicine and astrology. It assumes a close dependence of human health on the balance of the fluids in the body and on the planetary system. The social discourse is dominated by epidemics of infectious diseases. It is a collection of advices for organizing a society during a pandemic.

Michael Maier--nine newly discovered letters.

The authors provide a transcription, translation, and evaluation of nine newly discovered letters from the alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622) to Gebhardt Johann von Alvensleben (1576-1631), a noble landholder in the vicinity of Magdeburg. Stemming from the final year of his life, this correspondence casts new light on Maier's biography, detailing his efforts to secure patronage amid the financial crisis of the early Thirty Years' War. While his ill-fated quest to perfect potable gold continued to form the central focus of his patronage suits, Maier also offered his services in several arts that he had condemned in his printed works, namely astrology and "supernatural" magic. Remarks concerning his previously unknown acquaintance with Heinrich Khunrath call for a re-evaluation of Maier's negotiation of the discursive boundaries between Lutheran orthodoxy and Paracelsianism. The letters also reveal Maier's substantial contribution to a work previously ascribed solely to the English alchemist Francis Anthony.

Practical divinity and medical ethics: lawful versus unlawful medicine in the writings of William Perkins (1558-1602).

This article examines for the first time the theologically based medical ethics of the late sixteenth-century English Calvinist minister William Perkins. Although Perkins did not write a single focused book on the subject of medical ethics, he addressed a variety of moral issues in medicine in his numerous treatises on how laypeople should conduct themselves in their vocations and in all aspects of their daily lives. Perkins wrote on familiar issues such as the qualities of a good physician, the conduct of sick persons, the role of the minister in healing, and obligations in time of pestilence. His most significant contribution was his distinction between "lawful" and "unlawful" medicine, the latter category including both medical astrology and magic. Perkins's works reached a far greater audience in England and especially New England than did the treatises of contemporary secular medical ethics authors and his writings were influential in guiding the moral thinking of many pious medical practitioners and laypersons.

[The role of ancient astrology in preparation for a secular natural science and medicine]. / Zur Rolle der antiken Astrologie in der Vorbereitung einer säkularen Naturwissenschaft und Medizin.

The Persian period in the Near East (from c. 500 BCE) represented the first example of globalisation, during which advanced cultural centres from Egypt to Afghanistan were united under a single rule and common language. Paul Unschuld has drawn attention to a scientific revolution in the late first millennium BC, extending from Greece to China, from Thales to Confucius, which saw natural law replace the divine law in scientific thinking. This paper argues for new advances in astronomy as the specific motor which motivated changes in scientific thinking and influenced other branches of science, including medicine, just as the new science of astrology, which replaced divination, fundamentally changed the nature of medical prognoses. The secularisation of science was not universally accepted among ancient scholars, and the irony is that somewhat similar reservations accompanied the reception of modern quantum physics.

Albertus, "Magnus" or Magus? Magic, natural philosophy, and religious reform in the late middle ages.

This article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic mafic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. This article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion -- their apprehension and negotiation -- at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

Judicial astrology in theory and practice in later medieval Europe.

Interrogations and elections were two branches of Arabic judicial astrology made available in Latin translation to readers in western Europe from the twelfth century. Through an analysis of the theory and practice of interrogations and elections, including the writing of the Jewish astrologer Sahl b. Bishr, this essay considers the extent to which judicial astrology was practiced in the medieval west. Consideration is given to historical examples of interrogations and elections mostly from late medieval English manuscripts. These include the work of John Dunstaple (ca. 1390-1453), the musician and astrologer who is known have served at the court of John, duke of Bedford. On the basis of the relatively small number of surviving historical horoscopes, it is argued that the practice of interrogations and elections lagged behind the theory.

Stars, demons and the body in fifteenth-century England.

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates: Margery Jourdemayne, the 'Witch of Eye', Roger Bolingbroke, Oxford cleric and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, MB, canon of St. Stephen's, Westminster. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner's body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.

The astrological roots of mesmerism.

Franz Anton Mesmer's 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead's early eighteenth century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer's use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician's enlightened modernity while Mead's use of astro-meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century. Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astro-meteorology. Second, the close relations between astro-meteorology and Mead's project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment.

[Magical and religious healing in Byzantium]. / Mágikus es vallásos gyógyítás Bizáncban.

Religious and magical ways of healing have been known and practiced since the very beginning of human history. In the present article, the Byzantine philosophical, cultural, historical and "methodological" aspects of this way of healing are discussed. The article outlines the development of magic healing in Byzantium from the 4th to the 15th century. During this period magical therapy included the cult of patron saints--listed by the author--and pleading for divine intervention as well. The activity of "anargyroi" and the use of magical objects and amulets is also discussed in detail. Exorcism was also a part of religious therapy both against psychical and somatical diseases. In early Christianity, and especially in Byzantium the devil or other demons were also supposed to cause various somatical or psychical illnesses by "intrusion" or "internalisation," i.e. by possession or obsession of their victims.

'For the benefit of the people': the Dutch translation of the Fasciculus medicinae, Antwerp 1512.

The article deals with the Dutch translation of the Fasciculus medicinae based on the Latin edition, Venice 1495, with the famous woodcuts created in 1494 for the Italian translation of the original Latin edition of 1491. The woodcuts are compared with the Venetian model. New features in the Antwerp edition include the Skeleton and the Zodiac Man, bot originally based on German models. The text also deals with other woodcuts in the Low Countries based on these Venetian illustrations. The Appendices provide a short title catalog of all the editions and translations based on the Venetian edition and a stemma.

[Peter of Abano, the 'Conciliator' between magic and science]. / Pietro d'Abano il Conciliatore tra magia e scienza.

Peter of Abano is a personage belonging to history as well as to legend. In this analysis his historical physiognomy of scientist and physician is reconstructed on the basis of a better knowledge of his works in medicine and astronomy (now edited), a discipline, the latest one, in which he excelled in Medieval scientific context (The Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae (astrologiae) can be read in the critical edition by G. Federici Vescovini, Padova, Esedra, 1992). He opposed extreme position in all fields, by styling himself 'Conciliator' of opposed tendencies. He often reconfirmed a rational concept of medicine and astronomy, which dispelled any demoniac and magic features, against the fanciful legend elaborated during the following centuries.

[The Paduan doctor Alessandro Pellati, his library and the first edition of De medicorum astrologia]. / Il dottore padovano Alessandro Pellati, la sua biblioteca e l'editio princeps del De medicorum astrologia.

The article prints the text of a document in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, comprising a list of books intended for auction, with an estimate of their value. THey constitute the private library of Alessandro Pellati (d. 1487), a Paduan doctor about whom nothing is known, except his name appears in the colophon of the first edition of a short treatise attributed to Hippocrates, the De medicorum astrologia seu de esse aegrorum, translated into Latin and published in Padua in 1483. The considerable number of astrological works in his library show that Pellati was keenly interested in the subject which, under the title of "natural magic", had assumed a significant place in medical studies at that time, particularly in Padua.

La terapéutica farmacológica en España y Europa durante la Edad Moderna / The pharmacological therapy in Spain and Europe during the Modern Age

El proyecto de investigación hace referencia a los medicamentos relacionados con el escolasticismo galenista y con la influencia astrológica, alquímica y mágica, parte fundamental del paradigma científico de la Edad Moderna. A través de los fármacos, se estudian los avances científicos, el pensamiento no sólo científico, las ideas sanitarias y los anhelos de la época referentes a la salud. Se acabará redactando un repertorio de la relación entre plantas y la astrología, un lapidario, un bestiario; los medicamentos contra la peste; la sífilis y las perspectivas de los nuevos medicamentos americanos, el mesmerismo y la homeopatía

The investigation project makes reference to the medicines related with the galenic-scholastic style and with the astrological, alchemical and magical influence, it leaves fundamental of the scientific paradigm of the Modern Age. Through the medicines we study scientific advances, the thought not only scientific, the sanitary ideas and the yearnings of the time referents to the health. At the end we will edit a repertoire of the relationship between plants and the astrology; also a lapidary, a bestiarium (repertoire of animals); the medications against the pest; the syphilis and the perspectives of the American new medicines, the mesmerism and the homeopathy

The medical content of English almanacs 1640-1700.

There has been a great deal of recent interest in popular health care in early modern England, resulting in studies on a range of topics from practitioners through remedial treatment. Over the past decade, the history of books has also attracted growing interest. This is particularly true for the seventeenth century, a period marked by a dramatic rise in all types of printed works. The 1640s are especially significant in the evolution of printed vernacular medical publications, which continued to flourish during the rest of the century. While recent studies on popular medical books have contributed greatly to our understanding of contemporary medical beliefs and practices, they have failed to properly recognize the effect that almanacs had on early modern medicine. Although their primary function was not to disseminate medical information, most provided a great deal of medical information. Furthermore, these cheap, annual publications targeted and were read by a wide cross-section of the public, making them the first true form of British mass media. This article is based on the content of 1,392 almanacs printed between 1640 and 1700, which may make it the largest comparative study of the medical content of any early modern printed works. The project has resulted in two major findings. First of all, almanacs played a major part in the dissemination, continuing popularity, and longevity of traditional astrological and Galenic beliefs and practices. Secondly, at the same time, almanacs played an important early role in the growth of medical materialism in Britain.

Publishing the works of Nicholas Culpeper, astrological herbalist and translator of Latin medical works in seventeenth-century London.

This investigation attempts primarily to untangle the complex publishing history of the works of Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54), astrological herbalist and translator of Latin medical works. It therefore identifies those works published in seventeenth-century London: the study indicates that London stationers capitalized on the reputation of Nicholas Culpeper to build the widest possible market for his original astrological/herbal medical works and his translations from continental authors.