The Corruption of the Elements: The Science of Ritual Impurity in the Early Thirteenth Century (2016)
William of Auvergne, writing in De Legibus—a long treatise on the non-moral laws of ancient Judaism and related matters—identifies six kinds of leprosy according to appearance, six kinds according to the site of infection, and six kinds according to color. William’s concern with leprosy is very much a concern with matter—the bodies, the clothing, the buildings that contract leprosy. He theorizes about the causes of leprosy, about its diagnosis, about its treatment, extending his analysis even to the proper definition of the term. And his concern with leprosy is also very much a concern with the spirit. He suspects, for example, ancient inducements to idolatry in the treatment of leprous clothes and houses, and finds a divinely mandated need for ritual correction of such idolatry. We could perhaps call leprosy of the body a matter of natural science, leprosy of the spirit a matter of theology, but William would not. That distinction, reasonable as it seems, fails to capture William’s point of view, according to which the material and spiritual are composite elements in a single conceptualization. We have long recognized that medieval commentaries on certain topics—the days of creation, for example—are a potential locus of combined scientific and theological analysis; something comparable can perhaps be seen in medieval treatments of ancient concerns with ritual purity, impurity, and purification.
...MoreBook Jack P. Cunningham; Mark Hocknull (2016) Robert Grosseteste and the Pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages.
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