Die Rhetorik vormoderner Reformdebatten am Beispiel von europäischen Hospitälern

What exactly are people doing when they combat about reforming complex social institutions? How do the advocates and the adversaries of such reforms construct their arguments? How do historical debates on reforms differ from modern ones? The book approaches these questions from the observatory of the late middle ages and the 16th century and is intended to be a contribution to a rhetoric of premodern reform thinking. The setting is the hospital, an institution which was frequently in need of reform, but compact enough to allow detailed description. Four important European hospitalsthe Ospedale Maggiore of Milan, the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, the Große Spital of Strasbourg, and the Union of hospitals in Modena, Italyoffer sufficient source material for an analysis of the verbal (and sometimes physical) strives provoked by the reforms. The protagonists of these debates about words, metaphors, concepts and power were jurists, theologians, political authorities, administrators, religious communities and the lay staff.

Autorentext
Prof. Dr. Thomas Frank hat Geschichte und Romanistik in München, Freiburg i. Br. und Aix-en-Provence studiert. Er hat sich 2000 im Fach Mittelaltergeschichte an der Freien Universität Berlin habilitiert und war dort in der Forschergruppe »Topik und Tradition« tätig. Seit 2009 lehrt er Geschichte des Mittelalters an der Universität Pavia, Italien.