The Physiology of Vice in the Middle Ages

The project studies material and naturalistic explanations for human behaviour through the widely applied model of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, avarice, sloth, lechery and gluttony. In so doing, it considers how priests used medicine, both as a metaphor and a material practice, in diagnosing and treating people who came to confession. Two important movements occurs in this period: the codification of confession and the emergence of medicine as an academic study. Both events resulted in the circulation and translation of these texts. The project studies how these two fields of knowledge interacted in the period, 1215-1500.