The Vivarium was a monastery founded around the year 544 by Roman statesman, Cassiodorus near Squillace, in Calabria, Italy. [1] He also established a biblical studies center focused on studying the Bible as well as a library. It became a place where they worked on preserving Greek and Latin classical literature. [2]
In 540, Cassiodorus retired from public life and moved into the monastery, ordering the Benedictine monks living there to learn about medicinal herbs and to copy various medical texts, supposedly including works of Galen, Hippocrates and of the pharmacist Dioscorides. [3]
After Cassiodorus' death, the manuscripts housed here were dispersed, some making their way to the Lateran Palace. [2]
Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism.
Materia medica is a Latin term from the history of pharmacy for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, 'On medical material'.
Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, commonly known as Cassiodorus, was a Christian, Roman statesman, renowned scholar of antiquity, and writer serving in the administration of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. Senator was part of his surname, not his rank. He also founded a monastery, Vivarium, where he worked extensively the last three decades of his life.
A scriptorium was a writing room in medieval European monasteries for the copying and illuminating of manuscripts by scribes.
Historiae Ecclesiasticae Tripartitae Epitome, the abridged history of the early Christian Church known as the Tripartite History, was the standard manual of Church history in Medieval Europe.
Peter of Hispania was the author of the Tractatus, later known as the Summulae Logicales, an important medieval university textbook on Aristotelian logic. As the Latin Hispania was considered to include the entire Iberian Peninsula, he is traditionally and usually identified with the medieval Portuguese scholar and ecclesiastic Peter Juliani, who was elected Pope John XXI in 1276. The identification is sometimes disputed, usually by Spanish authors, who claim the author of the Tractatus was a Castilian Blackfriar. He is also sometimes identified as Petrus Ferrandi Hispanus.
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Dietmar von Aist was a Minnesinger from a baronial family in the Duchy of Austria, whose work is representative of the lyric poetry in the Danube region.
Rufus of Ephesus was a Greek physician and author who wrote treatises on dietetics, pathology, anatomy, gynaecology, and patient care. He was an admirer of Hippocrates, although he at times criticized or departed from that author's teachings. While several of his writings survive in full and have been critically edited, most are fragmentary and lack critical editions. His writings explore subjects often neglected by other authors, such as the treatment of slaves and the elderly. He was particularly influential in the East, and some of his works survive only in Arabic. His teachings emphasize the importance of anatomy and seek pragmatic approaches to diagnosis and treatment.
John bar Penkaye was a writer of the late seventh century who was a member of the Church of the East. He lived at the time of the fifth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.
Georg Graf was a German Orientalist. One of the most important scholars of Christian-Arabic literature, his 5-volume Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur is the foundational text in the field.
Gerard of Abbeville (1220-1272) was a theologian from the University of Paris. He formally became a theologian in 1257 and from then was known as an opponent of the mendicant orders, particularly in the second stage of the conflict, taking part in a concerted attack that temporarily affected their privileges.
Janus Cornarius was a Saxon humanist and friend of Erasmus. A gifted philologist, Cornarius specialized in editing and translating Greek and Latin medical writers with "prodigious industry," taking a particular interest in botanical pharmacology and the effects of environment on illness and the body. Early in his career, Cornarius also worked with Greek poetry, and later in his life Greek philosophy; he was, in the words of Friedrich August Wolf, "a great lover of the Greeks." Patristic texts of the 4th century were another of his interests. Some of his own writing is extant, including a book on the causes of plague and a collection of lectures for medical students.
Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz was a German church historian and director of the Evangelische Akademie Arnoldshain. She was co-editor of the journal Kirche und Israel and of the issue Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. She was known for her work on anti-Jewish tendencies in Christian theology.
Monastic schools were, along with cathedral schools, the most important institutions of higher learning in the Latin West from the early Middle Ages until the 12th century. Since Cassiodorus's educational program, the standard curriculum incorporated religious studies, the Trivium, and the Quadrivium. In some places monastic schools evolved into medieval universities which eventually largely superseded both institutions as centers of higher learning.
Altzella Abbey, also Altzelle Abbey, is a former Cistercian monastery near Nossen in Saxony, Germany. The former abbey contains the tombs of the Wettin margraves of Meissen from 1190 to 1381.
Nigel Fenton Palmer FBA was a British Germanist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford.
Klaus Zechiel-Eckes was a German historian and medievalist.
Sister-books is the term for a group of texts in the medieval literature. These works were written by Dominican nuns in the first half of the fourteenth century in South Germany and Switzerland. They relate the mystical experiences of sisters within the monastery, and were influential in the development of medieval mysticism.
Helmut Birkhan is an Austrian philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Ancient German Language and Literature and the former Managing Director of the Institute for Germanic Studies at the University of Vienna.
...he had a number of medical texts, including works attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Galen, Hippocrates and of the pharmacist Dioscorides