The Body in Pain Ca. 1400: Solomon de Piera and the Chief Rabbi’s Toothache

Abstract

Ancient authors paid attention to, meditated and articulated their observations on, the theme of teeth in Hebrew and Aramaic texts. In the Middle Ages, the theme of toothache appears in Hebrew texts written in Spain around 1400. The article reconstructs the historiography on the subject and questions it. It offers a reading of a poem on toothache by Shlomo de Piera and contextualizes it in the frame of European and Spanish representations of pain in the late Middle Ages.