This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.

The idea of contagious transmission, either by material particles or by infectious ideas, has played a powerful role in the development of the Western World since antiquity. Yet it acquired quite a precise signature during the process of scientific and cultural differentiation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This volume explores the significance and cultural functions of contagionism in this period, from notions of infectious homosexuality and the concept of social contagion to the political implications of bacteriological fieldwork. The history of the concept ‘microbe’ in aesthetic modernism is adressed as well as bacteriological metaphors in American literary historiography. Within this broad framework, contagionism as a literary narrative is approached in more focussed contributions: from its emotional impact in literary modernism to the idea of physical or psychic contagion in authors such as H.G. Wells, Kurt Lasswitz, Gustav Meyrinck, Ernst Weiss, Thomas Mann and Max Frisch. This twofold approach of general topics and individual literary case studies produces a deeper understanding of the symbolic implications of contagionism marking the boundaries between sick and healthy, familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.

The decades around 1900 were crucial in the evolution of modern medical and social sciences, and in the formation of various national health services systems. The modern fields of psychiatry and mental health care are located at the intersection of these spheres. There emerged concepts, practices, and institutions that marked responses to challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and the formation of the nation-state. These psychiatric responses were locally distinctive, and yet at the same time established influential models with an international impact. In spite of rising nationalism in Europe, the intellectual, institutional, and material resources that emerged in the various local and national contexts were rapidly observed to have had an impact beyond any national boundaries. In numerous ways, innovations were adopted and refashioned for the needs and purposes of new national and local systems. International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany, and the United States to World War II brings together hitherto separate approaches from the social, political, and cultural history of medicine and health care and argues that modern psychiatry developed in a constant, though not always continuous, transfer of ideas, perceptions, and experts across national borders. Contributors: John C. Burnham, Eric J. Engstrom, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Pamela Michael, Hans Pols, Volker Roelcke, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Mathew Thomson, Paul J. Weindling, Louise Westwood Volker Roelcke is professor and director at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Giessen University, Germany. Paul J. Weindling is professor in the history of medicine, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Louise Westwood is honorary research reader, University of Sussex, UK.

La historiografía médica reciente es principalmente urbana. La salud en el medio rural ofrece nuevas perspectivas que incluyen los procesos de interacción entre salud, cultura y medicina en el marco comparado europeo. Health and Medicine in Rural Europe refleja el esfuerzo combinado de grupos de investigación de Noruega, Inglaterra y España. La primera parte del libro incluye seis capítulos que combinan un acercamiento global a “lo rural” en el contexto europeo con estudios regionales específicos. Analizan también las políticas sanitarias en la España rural, el sistema zemstvo en el norte de la Rusia europea o las diferentes percepciones entre poblaciones rurales y urbanas y su transformación en Noruega. La Conferencia Europea de Higiene Rural celebrada en Ginebra en 1931 y las repercusiones sobre la administración sanitaria española dan paso a una reflexión sobre las interacciones entre medicina y culturas locales en España, Noruega y la Rusia europea. La segunda parte se ocupa de la salud rural y la práctica médica: la labor de los médicos generales en los hospitales y servicios de salud de la región inglesa; la función de los médicos rurales en la sociedad valenciana y en la región de Baviera, o las estrategias de lucha contra las enfermedades infecciosas en la Valencia rural. Los dos capítulos siguientes están consagrados al paludismo en las granjas de East Anglia y a las campañas de desarrolladas en Alicante durante el primer tercio del siglo XX. La parte final se refiere a aspectos institucionales: la labor de la Acadèmia d’Higiene de Catalunya; las redes asistenciales en la Mallorca rural, los primeros hospitales infantiles en Inglaterra o la labor realizada por la Gota de Leche en Alicante.

Focusing on an epoch of spectacular demographic, political, economic, and cultural changes for European Jewry, Cultural Intermediaries chronicles the lives and thinking of ten Jewish intellectuals of the Renaissance, nine of them from Italy and one a Portuguese exile who settled in the Ottoman empire after a long sojourn in Italy. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and the other contributors to this volume detail how, in the relative openness of cultural exchange encountered in such intellectual centers as Florence, Mantua, Pisa, Naples, Ferrara, and Salonika, these Jewish savants sought to enlarge their cultural horizons, to correlate the teachings of their own tradition with those outside it, and to rethink the meaning of their religious and ethnic identities within the intellectual and religious categories common to European civilization as a whole. The engaging intellectual profiles created especially for this volume by scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe represent an important rereading and reinterpretation of early modern Jewish culture and society and its broader European intellectual contexts.