Medieval Minds: Mental Health in the Middle Ages

What is “colonial” about medieval colonial medicine? Iberian health in global context

Colonial medicine is a thriving field of study in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine. Medicine can be used as a lens to view colonialism in action and as a way to critique colonialism. This article argues that key debates and ideas from that modern field can fruitfully be applied to the Middle Ages, especially for the early empires of Spain and Portugal (mid-fourteenth to...

Where did the ventricular localization of mental faculties come from?

During the Middle Ages it was widely believed that the various mental faculties-sensation, cognition, memory, and so forth-were each located in a specific part of the three ventricles that were thought to be housed in the brain. The origin of this scheme was commonly attributed to the ancient scholars, but it was rare for a specific individual to be identified as the originator. Modern research...

The medieval machine. The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

The scientific achievement of the Middle Ages

RICHARD C. DALES, The scientific achievement of the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973, 8vo, pp. ix, 182, illus., $12.50. Professor Dales has selected extracts from primary sources to illustrate early medieval scientific thought, from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and presents them with lengthy introductions in the form of an historical narrative. There are...

38 Practical Ethics

Much of medieval ethics was practical. Christian spiritual guidance, monastic culture, the regulatory interests of the Church and princes, as well as numerous other factors merged to create a moral framework with a distinct emphasis on application. Because moral and theological guidance were largely intertwined, practical ethics evolved under the guise of pastoral concerns. The subject area of ...