Medieval Medicine and Literature: A Galenic Presence in Dante's Writing

The attention to the relation between medieval medicine and Dante’s writing shows how contemporary scientific thought manifests itself both in evident and less explicit terms, which allude not to exclusively scientific concepts, but to structures of thought shared by other contemporary intellectual discussions, such as philosophy, ethics, political thought. This lecture investigates how the manifest incidence of strictly medical – and more precisely Galenic – notions, such as complexio or the hegemonic principle which rules the human being – permits the investigation of a more oblique presence, where medicine contributes to the formation of complex and multifaceted content.