NEWS A new book about bodies and souls, or medicine and religion in the Middle Ages, has newly been released by Virginia Langum, Pro Futura Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study at Uppsala University and associate professor in English literature at Umeå University.
The book Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture studies material and naturalistic explanations for human behavior through the widely applied model of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, avarice, sloth, lechery and gluttony. In so doing, it considers how priests used medicine, both as a metaphor and as a material practice, in diagnosing and treating people who came before them to confess their sins.
“Two important movements occur in this period: the codification of confession and the emergence of medicine as an academic study. Both events resulted in the circulation and translation of these texts. The book studies how these two fields of knowledge interacted in the period”, says Virginia Langum.
“Despite some excellent scholarship to the contrary, a narrative persists in some scholarship that the medieval church smothered science, or that religion and science were antagonistic. Instead, this book shows how religious writers, both theologians and priests, made use of ideas, images and practices from the field of medicine. Likewise, the medical profession recognized the utility of religion for health and used religious metaphors and ideas in medical writing”.
“There is a growing interest in the relationship of medicine and wider culture, not only in the Middle Ages but beyond. I hope this book will appeal to academics in several fields, not only medieval researchers but researchers within the history of ideas, medicine and religion, literary studies, linguistics, psychology and medical humanities”.
“However, I hope there will be a wider interest beyond the academy. There has always been a popular attraction to the seven deadly sins – many books, film series and articles are written about the sins every year. But people are also increasingly interested in medicine and determinism. To what extent does the body shape outlook, feelings and actions. To what extent does our body shape who we are”.
“This book was a lot of fun to write. Not only are the images and literature that describe the sins vivid, but there is a fascinating continuity in the way we blame our bodies throughout history. In fact, a colleague and I study this phenomenon over a long period in our master’s level course entitled Blaming the Body”.
Read more at virginialangum.com
Read more about Blaming the Body Course (Master’s Level Course at the Department of Languages)
Editor: Per Melander