The Medieval Translation Movement and Late Ancient Medical Texts with John Mulhall
Episode 49 - February 21, 2021
John Mulhall (Harvard University) joins the Infectious Historians to talk about the famous medieval translation movement and his own work on late antique texts. John first talks about what the translation movement was (and was not) along with how it worked and why it is so central to histories of medicine, science, and philosophy. In the second part of the episode, John turns to his own work on late ancient medical texts that were innovative in their understanding of medicine, disease, and especially plague as reactions to events happening in the world. At the end, he reflects upon what these new texts will mean for histories of the plague.
Further Reading
- d’Alverny, Marie-Thérèse. “Translations and Translators,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Edited by Robert Benson and Giles Constable with Carol Lanham, 421–462. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
- Burnett, Charles. “Translation and Transmission of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom,” in The Cambridge History of Science, volume 2: Medieval Science. Edited by David Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, 341–364. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Green, Monica. “Gloriosissimus Galienus: Galen and Galenic Writings in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Latin West,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen. Edited by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser, 319–342. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
- Kwakkel, Eric, Francis Newton, and Eliza Glaze. Medicine at Monte Cassino: Constantine the African and the Oldest Manuscript of his Pantegni. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.
- Mulhall, John. “Plague before the Pandemics: the Greek Medical Evidence for Bubonic Plague before the Sixth Century.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 93 (2019): 151–179.
- Mulhall, John. “Confronting Pandemic in Late Antiquity: The Medical Response to the Justinianic Plague.” Journal of Late Antiquity (forthcoming).
Our Guest
John Mulhall,
PhD Candidate, Harvard University
