Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean. The Medieval Mediterranean, 110. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017, 250 p.

Abstract

If medieval priests cared for the soul and physicians cared for the body, who cared for the emotions, those passions or accidents of the soul that seemed both to drive and derive from physical and spiritual processes? Naama Cohen-Hanegbi’s first monograph treats these tensions, examining how learned medicine and its practitioners in the late medieval Mediterranean approached emotions and their relation to the physical and spiritual body. Drawing from medical texts – including commentaries, quaestiones, compendia of medical practice (practica), and case studies (consilia) – as well as confessors’ manuals and other practical religious texts, Cohen-Hanegbi argues that the lines between medical and spiritual care slowly blurred throughout the late medieval period as physicians increasingly infused moral and religious advice into their medical practice.