historyproef

In this heavily edited and redacted version of a talk I gave earlier this year at the annual conference for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, I look at how 14-15th cen medico-philosphers tried to understand poison by employing two different, though related, natural philosophical explanations that hinged on the concept of ‘species’. Introduction 14th and  [read on...]

When even I find myself repeatedly asking the same question or generally doing the same kind of work over and over again, i suffer from extreme guilt of inefficiency. My last bout of frustration came from a Renaissance text on poison with an unusually dense spate of references to classical and Arabic medical authorities. I  [read on...]