Acceptance and rejection of medical knowledge: Latin translation of Arabic medical texts during the 11th~14th centuries

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국서양중세사학회
· 수록지 정보 : 서양중세사연구 / 52호 / 81 ~ 106페이지
· 저자명 : 남종국

초록

In his The Cantebury Tales, the 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer denounced Constantine the African as a damned monk. This article starts with the question of against what background this accusation was made. Moving from Africa to Southern Italy at the end of the 11th century, Constantine became a Benedictine monk and translated Arabic medical texts into Latin. Among the many medical books he translated, [De coitu] proved to be the most scandalous in Christian society. From the 11th century to the 13th century, Christian Europe translated Arabic writings in various fields of the sciences, including medicine, into Latin. There was resistance to the acceptance of new science and knowledge. In particular, Islamic medical knowledge about sexual intercourse was at odds with Medieval Christian sexual morals and ethics. This article attempts to analyze in what respect the Medieval Christian sexual ethics and Islamic medical knowledge differed, and what results these differences produced.
Even though from the beginning, Christianity had not dealt with sexual issues (including sexual intercourse) from an oppressive point of view, the church’s attitudes towards sexual intercourse came to be more and more oppressive. The church argued that sexual intercourse was a punishment following the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and, as such, was never to be a pleasurable act. It was permitted only for legally married couples and the church emphasized that its purpose should be reproduction, not pleasure. For that reason, the church declared that Christians should avoid this shameful act as much as possible, and even specified the days when sexual intercourse was permitted. On the other hand, Islamic medical texts translated and introduced to Europe in the 11th to 13th centuries provided positive knowledge about sexual intercourse. In these texts, it was taught that sexual intercourse was pleasurable and that it could be used as a cure for many ailments. These different perspectives and positions on sexual intercourse sparked conflict, and for that reason, some content was omitted in the process of translations. Although this article does not explain it in detail, the influx of new knowledge that was not omitted in translation contributed, to a certain extent, to gradually changing the perceptions of medical and sexual knowledge in Medieval Christian society.

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