Medicine And The Reformation

The tremendous changes in the role and significance of religion during Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation affected all of society. Yet, there have been few attempts to view medicine and the ideas underpinning it within the context of the period and see what changes it underwent. Medicine and the Reformation charts how both popular and official religion affected orthodox medicine as well as more popular healers. Illustrating the central part played by medicine in Lutheran teachings, the Calvinistic rationalization of disease, and the Catholic responses, the contributors offer new perspectives on the relation of religion and medicine in the early modern period. It will be of interest to social historians as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

The tremendous changes in the role and significance of religion during Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation affected all of society. Yet, there have been few attempts to view medicine and the ideas underpinning it within the context of the period and see what changes it underwent. Medicine and the Reformation charts how both popular and official religion affected orthodox medicine as well as more popular healers. Illustrating the central part played by medicine in Lutheran teachings, the Calvinistic rationalization of disease, and the Catholic responses, the contributors offer new perspectives on the relation of religion and medicine in the early modern period. It will be of interest to social historians as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

Studies of the medical histories of Luther, Calvin and Knox show just how far short they fell of enjoying full physical well-being. These furnish a secure basis for attempting the more difficult task of analysing their emotional or psychological histories.

Recent decades have witnessed the fragmentation of Reformation studies, with high-level research confined within specific geographical, confessional or chronological boundaries. By bringing together scholars working on a wide variety of topics, this volume counteracts this centrifugal trend and provides a broad perspective on the impact of the European reformation. The essays present new research from historians of politics, of the church and of belief. Their geographical scope ranges from Scotland and England via France and Germany to Transylvania and their chronological span from the 1520s to the 1690s Considering the impact of the Reformation on political culture and examining the relationship between rulers and ruled; the book also examines the church and its personnel, another sphere of life that was entirely transformed by the Reformation. Important aspects of knowledge and belief are discussed in terms of scientific knowledge and technological progress, juxtaposed with analyses of elite and popular belief, which demonstrates the limitations of Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world. Together they indicate the diverse directions in which Reformation scholarship is now moving, while reminding us of the need to understand particular developments within a broader European context; demonstrating that movements for religious reform left no sphere of European life untouched.

The close relationship between religion, medicine and natural philosophy in the post-Reformation period has been documented and explored in a body of research since the 1990s; however, the direct and continued impact of Melanchthonian natural philosophy within the individual Lutheran principalities of northern Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular still has to be fully investigated and understood. This volume provides insight into how and why medicine and natural philosophy in a 'liberal' and Melanchthonian form could continue to blossom in Scandinavia despite a growing Lutheran uniformity promoted by the State. Inspired by research emanating from the Cambridge Unit for the History of Medicine, here a number of young scholars such as Adam Mosley, Morten Fink-Jensen, Signe Nipper Nielsen and Martin Kjellgren are joined with more established scholars such as Andrew Cunningham, Jens Glebe-Møller, Terhi Kiiskinen and Ole Peter Grell to create a volume which deals with not only the major issues but also the leading personalities of the period.

This examines the effects of the Counter- Reformation on health care and poor relief in Southern Catholic Europe in the period between 1540 and 1700.