Quis enim possit investigare rationes, imaginationes et memorias anime?: The functions of the brain and their alterations in scholastic medicine.

Abstract

In the medieval world of which Petrarch was a critic and heir, the analysis of reason and, in general, of the brain's own functions did not belong to a specific field of knowledge. However, medical studies presented a specific peculiarity: the need for their theoretical approach to offer a satisfactory explanation not only to the normal functioning of these operations but also to their alterations. This work deals with this particularity, real or developed rhetorically to delimit a professional space of its own, paying special attention to the epistemological value that scholastic medicine gave to the subjectivity of the madman.