Albert the Great’s (Albertus Magnus) natural philosophy and observations of nature in the thirteenth century paved the way for modern science. This mini-conference focuses on Albert’s understanding of health, disease, and disability.
Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus; d. 1280) was a distinguished Scholastic theologian and natural philosopher who is celebrated as one of the outstanding forerunners of modern science, not least for his many experiments and observations of nature. Medieval medical students later used Albert’s massive commentary on Aristotle’s On Animals and Pseudo-Albert’s On the Secrets of Women for their discussions of comparative anatomy and physiology. This mini-conference examines aspects of natural philosophy in Albert’s thought, specifically his understanding of health, disease, and disability.
Welcome
Irven M. Resnick, University of Tennessee (Chattanooga)
Albert the Great’s Approach to Medicine
Henryk Anzulewicz, Albertus-Magnus-Institut
Coffee Break
Healing Metals? Alchemy and Medicine as Arts for Recovering Bodily Substances
Mario Loconsole, University of Salento
Lunch
Albert, the Rabbi, and the Balsam: On Some Strange Quotations
Görge Hasselhoff, TU Dortmund University
Coffee Break
The Notion of Complexional Form from Albert the Great’s De Vegetabilibus to Pharmacological Debates in the Medical School of Bologna
Marilena Panarelli, University of Palermo
Albert the Great on Fevers and other Diseases
Alessandro Palazzo, University of Trento
Coffee Break
Diseases, Defects, and Anomalies in the Embryological Process: Albert the Great and Virtus formative
Amalia Cerrito, University of Trento
Lunch
Taking Care, Taking Control: Women's Health-Care in the German Vernacular Translations of Ps.-Albert's Secrets of Women
Keagan Brewer, independent scholar
Coffee Break
Animals as Natural Physicians and Sources of Health
Irven M. Resnick, University of Tennessee (Chattanooga)
Henryk Anzulewicz (Dr theol., University of Bonn) has been an editor at the Albertus-Magnus-Institut in Bonn since 1983. He has held a visiting professorship at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Santiago, Chile) and was a visiting scholar in philosophy at Stanford University, St. Kliment Ochridski University (Sofia, Bulgaria), and the Philosophy Department at the Indiana University Bloomington (USA). He is the author or editor of numerous volumes on Albertus Magnus and more than 150 scholarly articles.
Keagan Brewer’s research considers the complex intersections between belief, behaviour, and emotions in medieval Western Europe. Within this framework, his research has traversed the crusades, atheism and religious scepticism, marvels, the Voynich manuscript, and the legend of Prester John. He enjoys editing and translating texts, and has published several volumes in Routledge’s Crusade Texts in Translation series. His current work considers the emotions associated with atheism among medieval Europeans and (separately) women's secrets in German vernacular writing.
Amalia Cerrito is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento, where she works on a project titled ‘Between Science and Myth: Albert the Great, his Sources and his Followers’. Her research focuses on the intersection between philosophy, medicine, and theology in 13th-century embryology. She published several articles on the theoretical background of Albert the Great's zoology and botany, with a special focus on the Neoplatonic influence on Albert's natural philosophy. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Santorio Award for Excellence in Research, and recently published with the title Albert the Great and the configuration of the Embryo. Virtus Formativa. She is associate member of the ‘Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance’ (CSMBR); of the ‘Italian Society for the Study of Medieval Thought’ (SISPM), and of the ‘Center for the Edition of Philosophical Medieval and Renaissance texts’ (CETEFIL).
Görge Hasselhoff studied theology, philosophy and Jewish studies (PhD 2004 in Heidelberg: Dicit Rabbi Moysses. Studien zum Bild des Moses Maimonides in der lateinsichen Literatur des Mittelalters, Würzburg, 2nd ed., 2005; habilitation TU Dortmund University, 2015). He has held positions at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn and Bochum, and guest professorships at Porto Alegre (Brazil), Potsdam (Germany), Sao Leopoldo (Brazil), and UA Barcelona (Catalunya). Currently he is a minister of the Protestant Church and adjunct professor (PD) at TU Dortmund University. He has published several monographs, edited volumes, articles and reviews. Currently he is the editor of Ramon Martí, Pugio fidei, and Rashi Latinus.
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Annika Lante
Mario Loconsole grew up in Puglia and was educated in Italy (Bari and Lecce), Belgium (Leuven) and Germany (Cologne). He is a historian of philosophy, specialising in medieval philosophy, with a particular passion for natural philosophy and the edition of unedited texts. His recent studies have focused on Albert the Great's natural philosophy – in particular on mineralogy – Dante Alighieri's philosophical thought, and the late medieval reception of Averroes' works in Italian universities. He is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Salento (Lecce).
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University of Cologne
Alessandro Palazzo is an associate professor of History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Trento. He is a specialist in medieval German philosophy and medieval forms of prognostication (prophecy, geomancy, and astrology). He has published studies on Albert the Great, Meister Eckhart, Berthold of Moosburg, and Denys the Carthusian, and has produced critical editions of Ulrich of Strasbourg's De summo bono. The critical edition of Book 1 of Henry of Herford's Catena aurea entium is forthcoming. He is currently preparing the edition of the Estimaverunt Indi, the Latin translation of an anonymous Arabic treatise of geomancy condemned in 1277 by bishop Étienne Tempier.
Dr Panarelli is a tenure-track researcher at the University of Palermo and recently received an ERC Starting Grant for her project ‘ReMedY – Reassessing Late-Medieval Pharmacology: Logical and Metaphysical Tools in the Medical Context’. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Albertus-Magnus-Institut in Bonn, where she worked on a project titled ‘Morphological Homology in Medieval Dendrology’. Dr Panarelli has conducted extensive research on the natural philosophy of Albert the Great, with a particular focus on his work De vegetabilibus. Additionally, she has critically edited Book VII of Henry of Herford’s Catena aurea entium.
Irven M. Resnick is Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Chair of Excellence in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee (Chattanooga, USA) and Senior Fellow at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr during the winter term 2024/25. In addition to English translations of works by Albertus Magnus, he edited the Brill Companion to Albert the Great. Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences (2013) and published Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature (London: Reaktion Press, 2022; with Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr).
Prof. Irven M. Resnick
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA) | Philosophy and Religion
E-mail: irven.resnick@college-uaruhr.de
Irven M. Resnick (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is a professor of Philosophy and Religion and has held the Chair of Excellence in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA) since 1990. Resnick has received numerous grants and awards, including a DAAD Research Visit Grant to Germany. He has been a Corresponding Fellow at the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University (Israel), and from 2003 to 2018 he was a Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (UK), where he also directed four National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes for university faculty. From 2006 to 2008, he was an associate of the sub-faculty of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University’s Oriental Institute. For fall semester 2006, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
Irven Resnick has published nineteen volumes (as author, translator, or editor) and more than sixty academic journal articles.
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Prof. Alexandra Cuffel
Ruhr University Bochum, CERES | Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
E-mail: alexandra.cuffel@rub.de
Prof. Alexandra Cuffel
Ruhr University Bochum, CERES | Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
E-mail: alexandra.cuffel@rub.de
Alexandra Cuffel is Professor of Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. Until 2012 she has been Adjunct Professor of History at the College of New Jersey and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, NYC. From 2004 to 2008 she was Assistant Professor of pre-modern World History at Macalester College. Prior to that she was Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received several fellowships, among them a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2007, the Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship from Harvard Divinity School in 2006, and a fellowship from the Dorot Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996.
Her research focuses on relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, specifically on the intersections of religious polemic, medical theories and gender both in Western Europe and the Middle East. Further research interests are shared saints’ cults and festivals in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean and "racial" attitudes in the Middle Ages.
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