Studying Ibn Sīnā, Performing Abulafia in a Mid-Sixteenth-Century Prison: Emotional, Medical, and Mystical Bodies between Italy and Silesia

Historians often address knowledge transfer in two ways: As an extension and continuation of an established tradition, or as the tradition's modification in an act of individual reception. This article explores the tension between the two approaches through a case study of Eliezer Eilburg. It traces the footsteps of a sixteenth-century German Jew and his study of the late medieval Hebrew medical and mystical literature composed in the wider Mediterranean. As it uncovers the cultural, political, and social processes shaping knowledge transfer between various Jewish cultures and geographies, the article highlights the receiver's individual agency. Under the thickly described intellectual traditions, it is the receiver's lived experience that allows historians to grasp the impact of knowledge on the lives of premodern people-the impact on their body and its relation to the world and to God. Building this argument, this article problematizes the relationship between theory and practice.