E cominciai a travagliare sì come farnetica persona (Vita nova XXIII, 4 / 14, 4). Notes for a Cultural History of Frenzy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-2214/12917Keywords:
Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, divination, madness, frenzy, illness, medicine, possession, prophecyAbstract
The historical-semantic aspect of a pathological condition associated with altered states of consciousness is analyzed through lexical evidence in relation to the discursive and ritual registers of religion and disease. Special attention is focused on the diabolical and divinatory connotation of states of frenzy in late antique and medieval Christianity. The case study highlights the risks of a philological-textual approach to the history of medical practices and knowledge, which creates the illusion of being able to decipher the cultural foundation of symptoms and diseases in literary texts by selecting technical vocabulary and automatically linking it to contemporary scholastic medicine treatises.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Luigi Canetti
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