In my dissertation, I argue that the medical milieu of the 13th century contributed to shape vernacular secular culture. I demonstrate how the historical and scientific contexts of the Italian peninsula, from the Sicilian school of Frederick II and Manfred to the communal realities of Bologna and Florence, testify to the active reception of the works of Aristotle, Galen, and their Arabic and Western commentators in poetic circles. I show how the Italian 13th century was informed by a high degree of intellectual and scientific knowledge, and how the far-reaching penetration of medical sources connects an emerging vernacular culture to the intricacy of urban networks. "Of Poets and Physicians" addresses the following questions: what is the contribution of medical literature to Italian poetry of the 13th century? How can the reception of Aristotelian and Galenic physiological theories help us illuminate the way Medieval literature produced its tropes? Why should we consider these cultural and intellectual environments as productive frames of thought for poetical writings? My dissertation addresses these questions in three macro-chapters. In the first chapter (On Fluid Memory), I argue that under the patronage and influence of Frederick II and Manfred, the reception of Aristotle’s physiology of the soul informed the tropes of the memory image of the lady engraved into the heart, used by Giacomo da Lentini and the other vernacular poets at court. In the second chapter (Minding the Brain), I study the influence of Galen and Arabic Galenism on the intellectual circles of the second half of the 13th century. I argue that the influence of the Bolognese Galenism of Taddeo Alderotti informed a great part of Guinizzelli’s poetry, not only with respect to the phenomenology of love, but also in his views on nobility and natural determinism. In the third chapter (All Things Natural), I combine the Aristotelian discourse on ethics and the Galenic question of temperamental determinism. I analyze how the scientific background on the relationship between bodily balance and the functions of the soul is discussed in Taddeo Alderotti’s translation of an epitome of Aristotelian ethics, and how these debates are reframed in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Cino da Pistoia, by virtue of the relationship between love and reason. While contextualizing the uses of medical thought in the poetical production of philosophical and poetic authors, I demonstrate how the active reception of scientific theories testifies to the high degree and pervasiveness of medical education in the intellectual circles of the 13th century.

Thesis (M.A. in English)--Vanderbilt University, May 2005. / Available in both PDF and MS-WORD file formats. Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-324).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 518-539). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis examines concepts of disease existing in the Anglo-Saxon period. The focus is in particular on the conceptual intricacies pertaining to pestilence or, in modern terms, epidemic disease. The aim is to (1) establish the different aspects of the cognitive conceptualisation and their representation in the language and (2) to illustrate how they are placed in relation to other concepts within a broader understanding of the world. The scope of this study encompasses the entire corpus of Old English literature, select Latin material produced in Anglo-Saxon England, as well as prominent sources including works by Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, and Pope Gregory the Great. An introductory survey of past scholarship identifies main tenets of research and addresses shortcomings in our understanding of historic depictions of epidemic disease, that is, a lack of appreciation for the dynamics of the human mind. The main body of research will discuss the topic on a lexico-semantic, contextual and wider cultural level. An electronic evaluation of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus establishes the most salient semantic fields surrounding instances of cwealm and wol (‘pestilence’), such as harmful entities, battle and warfare, sin, punishment, and atmospheric phenomena. Occurrences of pestilential disease are distributed across a variety of text types including (medical) charms, hagiographic and historiographic literature, homilies, and scientific, encyclopaedic treatises. The different contexts highlight several distinguishable aspects of disease, (‘reason’, ‘cause’, ‘symptoms’, ‘purpose’, and ‘treatment’) and strategically put them in relation with other concepts. Connections within this conceptual network can be based on co-occurrence, causality, and analogy and are set within a wider cultural frame informed largely though not exclusively by Christian doctrine. The thesis concludes that Anglo-Saxon ideas of disease must be viewed as part of a complex web of knowledge and beliefs in order to understand how they can be framed by various discourses with more or less diverging objectives. The overall picture emerging from this study, while certainly not being free from contradiction, is not one of superstition and ignorance but is grounded in observation and integrated into many-layered systems of cultural knowledge.

Thesis supervisor: Garrett Stewart. Includes bibliographic references (p. 193-202).

Thèse - Fribourg. / Bibliography: p. [153]-154.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-277). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Literature, August 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1999. / Adviser: Carol Houlihan Flynn. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-281). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;