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Florence Eliza Glaze and Brian K. Nance, eds. Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval & Early Modern Europe. Micrologus' Library 39. Florence: Sismel, 2011. xii + 570 pp. Ill. euro72.00 (978-88-8450-401-2).
The essays collected in this volume originated as papers delivered at a 2007 symposium honoring the scholarly career of Michael R. McVaugh. The contributors address a generous array of topics related to "the intellectual, social, material, and economic conditions in which medieval and early modern medicine operated" (pp. 3-4) through an equally generous range of methodologies. As the editors explain, this "variety of approaches reflects in many respects the range of McVaugh's own interests" (p. 4). Although the editors also humbly describe this diversely oriented volume as "a sort of medical history smorgasbord, or even a florilegium" (p. 20), it nevertheless achieves a degree of coherence that many Festschriften lack. The excellent introduction establishes clear through-lines and connections among the carefully edited and organized contributions, and most of the essays explicitly engage at least one aspect of McVaugh's work while also resonating productively with one another.
Each of the twenty-one essays merits close consideration, but for the present review it will have to suffice to merely survey the rich and diverse offerings composing the volume's three sections. The first section gathers contributions on "Communities of Knowledge" that contextualize certain of the relationships "between text and patient" invoked in the title of the volume. The section begins with a searching study by Francis Newton that reassesses Constantine the African's relationship with...