Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide?
Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today.
Author(s): Carlo Ginzburg, Lucio Biasiori
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 374
City: London
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part 1 Casuistry and Medicine across Time and Space
Chapter 1 A Framework for Casuistry: The Royal College of Paediatrics Guidance for Decision Making at the End of Life (2004–2015)
The case of Charlie Gard
Notes
Chapter 2 The Medical Case Narrative in Pre-Modern Europe and China: Comparative History of an Epistemic Genre
What is a case?
Comparing the observatio medica and the yi’an: Similarities
Comparing the observatio medica and the yi’an: Differences
Did cases travel between East and West?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part 2 Religious Anomalies in the Ancient and Medieval World
Chapter 3 Ritual and Its Transgressions in Ancient Greece
Ritual: Etymology and semantic development
The Thesmophoria
The Eleusinian Mysteries
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 4 The Case about Jesus: (Counter-)History and Casuistry in Toledot Yeshu
Myth and Casuistry
What is Toledot Yeshu?
Case and Novel
Jesus as “Case”
Jesus the Magician
Magic in Toledot Yeshu
The Arrogant Bastard . . .
. . . And the Adulterous Mother
The Unwilling Adulteress
Mary and the Jews
Counter-History as Casuistry
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part 3 Legal Casuistry between Judaism and Islam
Chapter 5 “I Signed but I Did not Say”: The Status of Chess in Early Modern Judaism
Notes
Chapter 6 The Many Roads to Justice: A Case of Adultery in Sixteenth-Century Cairo
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 7 Islamic Casuistry and Galenic Medicine: Hashish, Coffee, and the Emergence of the Jurist-Physician
Fiqh as casuistry
Hospital culture and the emergence of the jurist-physicians
Al-Qarāfī’s medical-legal casuistry
Al-Jazīrī’s treatise on the permissibility of coffee: Casuistry and public order
The convergence of fiqh and tibb and the growth of casuistry
Notes
Part 4 Casuistry between Reformation and Counter-Reformation
Chapter 8 The Exception as Norm: Casuistry of Suicide in John Donne’s Biathanatos
Crime and sin
“My cases of conscience”: Donne the casuist
Biathanatos and casuistry
“A false thread”
“Doing one thing while feigning another, for the public good”: Donne’s Machiavellian casuistry
“I dare not profess myself a master in so curious a science”: Beyond casuistry
Notes
Chapter 9 “Whether ’tis Lawful for a Man to Beat His Wife”: Casuistical Exercises in Late Stuart and Early Hanoverian England
Notes
Part 5 Norms and Exceptions in the Early Modern Global World (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Chapter 10 Indians’ Forced Labor as a Case for Exception in Seventeenth-Century Colonial America
Derecho Indiano: A casuistic body of law
Solórzano’s legal treatises: An overview
The state of the Indians
Indian forced labor
Adaptation, accommodation, and flexibility
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 11 Morality and Empire: Cases, Norms, and Exceptions in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Asia
Introduction
The “casado” complex
The Jesuits enter the scene
Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 12 An “Our Father” for the Hottentots: Religion, Language, and the Consensus Gentium
Exceptions
The collectors of “Our Fathers”
Language and religion
Consensus gentium
Apologist casuistry
Light and shadow
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part 6 Inside and outside Port-Royal
Chapter 13 Port-Royal at Grips with Its Own Casuistry and Pascal’s Stand
Notes
Chapter 14 Casuistry and Irony: Some Reflections on Pascal’s Provinciales
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Manuscripts
Printed Works
Bibliography
Index
