Book Review

摘要

Frederick Gibbs’ excellent and erudite book provides a systematic overview of how exactly poison was understood in scholarly medical circles in premodern Europe. Gibbs covers the topic over the long durée, from classical Greek and Roman sources to the early modern period, with a particular focus on the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. While there has been significant recent research on many aspects of poison in medieval and early modern Europe, Gibbs is the first historian to dive deep into the complexities of how exactly premodern scholarly authors conceptualised poison and poisoning.