The intra-religious dialogue of medieval converts from Judaism to Christianity is evident in the works of the fourteenth-century Sevillian physician Jean of Avignon (known in Hebrew as Moshe ben Shmuel of Roquemaure). Jean, a translator of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicine into Hebrew and the author of Sevillana medicina, was recurrently engaged in translating, transmitting, and debating religious notions and terms to his readers of both faiths. The medical arena in which this religious encounter took place, a common ground in many ways, enabled conveying and contemplating religious knowledge and practices. Sentiments of discord between faiths and societies alongside attempts to resolve such conflicts emerging in both of these works; the texts seem to evoke Jean’s complex inner vicissitudes between the two worlds. This essay discusses the personal religious tension in Jean’s works, granting significant attention to the special value of the medical context in serving as a terrain upon which the religious dialogue is worked through.
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D. Iancu-Agou, “La pratique du latin chez les médecins juifs et néophytes de Provence médiévale,” in Latin into Hebrew, 1:85–102; Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jacob ben Elie, traducteur, multilinge à Venise à la fin du xiiie siècle,” Gli Ebrei e le scienze: The Jews and the Sciences, Micrologus 9 (Florence: sismel, 2001), 195–202.
Gad Freudenthal, “The Father of the Latin-into-Hebrew Translations: ‘Doeg the Edomite,’ the Twelfth-Century Repentant Convert,” in Latin into Hebrew, 1:105–120.
H. Schirmann, Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provençe (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1961), 1.2:557–575 (in Hebrew). See also the discussion of Ben Menachem concerning the motif of misfortune in Naphtali Ben Menachem, “Ha-Ra’aba’s Complaint about his Misfortune,” Sinai 24 (1948): 68–71 (in Hebrew).
See Elaine Wertheimer, “Converso ‘Voices’ in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Spanish Literature,” in Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond: Departures and Change, ed. Kevin Ingram (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 97–119. See also Amy Aronson-Friedman and Gregory B. Kaplan, eds., Marginal Voices: Studies in Converso Literature of Medieval and Golden Age Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
Joseph Ziegler, “Religion and Medicine: On the Adaptation of Latin and Vernacular Medical Texts to Hebrew Readership,” Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen 18 (1999): 149–158.
Katelyn Mesler, “The Three Magi and Other Christian Motifs in Medieval Hebrew Medical Incantations: A Study in the Limits of Faithful Translation,” in Latin into Hebrew : 1:161–218. See also, Cohen-Hanegbi, “Transmitting Medicine,” 132–134.
Mesler, “The Three Magi,” 164–191; and Cohen-Hanegbi, “Transmitting Medicine,” 132–134. Bernard’s passage also attracted some discussion of the relationship between magic, medicine, and religion. See Demaitre, Doctor Bernard, 159; Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16.3 (2003): 352–353.
Eleazar Gutwirth, “Dialogue and the City, circa 1400: Pero Ferruz and the Rabbis of Alcalá,” Jewish History 21 (2007): 43–67, esp. 57–58.
Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993). In the following century there were even Hebrew adaptations to this genre: Ram Ben-Shalom, “The First Jewish Work on the Seven Sins and the Four Virtues,” Mediaeval Studies 75 (2013): 205–270.
Ram Ben-Shalom, pp. 487–491. See also Na’ama Cohen-Hanegbi, Accidents of the Soul: Physicians and Confessors on the Conception and Treatment of Emotions in Italy and Spain, 12th–15th Centuries (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 2011), 80–81, 251.
Maaike Van Der Lugt, Le Ver, le démon et la vierge : Les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004), 258.
Quoted in Maaike van der Lugt, Le Ver, le démon et la vierge, 101.
Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, 259–267; Chiara Crisciani, “History, Novelty and Progress in Scholastic Medicine,” in Osiris, 2nd Series, 6 (1990): 118–139.
William J. Courtenay, “Curers of Body and Soul: Medical Doctors as Theologians,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001), 69–75.
Joseph Ziegler, “Bodies, Diseases, and the Preservation of Health as Foci of Inter-Religious Encounters in the Middle Ages,” in Médecine et religion: Compétitions, collaborations, conflits (xii–xx siècles), ed. Luc Berlivet, Sara Cabibbo, Maria Pia Donato, Raimondo Michetti, and Marilyn Nicoud (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013), 43–63.
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The intra-religious dialogue of medieval converts from Judaism to Christianity is evident in the works of the fourteenth-century Sevillian physician Jean of Avignon (known in Hebrew as Moshe ben Shmuel of Roquemaure). Jean, a translator of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicine into Hebrew and the author of Sevillana medicina, was recurrently engaged in translating, transmitting, and debating religious notions and terms to his readers of both faiths. The medical arena in which this religious encounter took place, a common ground in many ways, enabled conveying and contemplating religious knowledge and practices. Sentiments of discord between faiths and societies alongside attempts to resolve such conflicts emerging in both of these works; the texts seem to evoke Jean’s complex inner vicissitudes between the two worlds. This essay discusses the personal religious tension in Jean’s works, granting significant attention to the special value of the medical context in serving as a terrain upon which the religious dialogue is worked through.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 323 | 51 | 6 |
Full Text Views | 191 | 3 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 84 | 9 | 0 |