Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean

Explores medieval pharmacology across all the relevant Mediterranean traditions, i.e. Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, and Latin.

Adopts a pan-Mediterranean approach to the study of medieval medicine and pharmacology, which permits a deeper understanding of broader phenomena such as the transfer of scientific knowledge and cultural exchange. Of great importance to medical historians, medieval historians and scholars of Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, and Latin traditions.In this volume a distinguished international team of scholars examines the history of drugs within all the major medical traditions of the medieval Mediterranean, namely Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, and Latin, and in so doing analyses a considerable number of previously unedited or barely explored texts. A Mediterranean-wide perspective permits a deeper understanding of broader phenomena such as the transfer of scientific knowledge and cultural exchange, by looking beyond single linguistic traditions or political boundaries. It also highlights the diversity and vitality of the medieval Mediterranean pharmacological tradition, which, through its close links with cookery, alchemy, magic, religion and philosophy, had to be able to adapt to multiple contexts, not least to changing social and political realities, as in the case of drugs as diplomatic gifts.