MA Researching the Middle Ages: Hagiography and Socio-Medical History. Handout (original) (raw)
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NEH Syllabus - Health and Disease in the Middle Ages (Summer 2012)
2012
This is the syllabus for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Seminar that was run in London in 2012. Designed and taught by Monica H. Green and Rachel E. Scott, the Seminar was designed as an introduction to medieval history of medicine for scholars who hadn't received advanced training in the field, but wanted to incorporate its insights into their work. Participants included not only historians, but a physical anthropologist, literature scholars, and other humanists. It was a life-changing experience for us all!
NEH Summer Seminar 2012 - "Health and Disease in the Middle Ages," London, UK
http://www.public.asu.edu/\~mhgreen/healthanddisease2012/index.html “Health and Disease in the Middle Ages” was a five-week Seminar for College and University Teachers held June 24-July 28, 2012, in London, England. Based at the Wellcome Library—the world's premier research center for medical history—this Seminar gathered scholars from across the disciplines interested in questions of health, disease, and disability in medieval Europe. Support for this Seminar came from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). We explored how the new scientific technologies of identifying pathogens (particularly leprosy and plague) could inform traditional, humanistic methods (historical, literary, art historical, and linguistic) of understanding cultural responses to disease and disability. Reciprocally, we also explored how traditional, humanistic studies of medieval medicine could inform modern scientific studies of disease, which were developing at a rapid pace thanks to new methods of DNA retrieval and analysis. Special emphasis wasmplaced on assisting participants with independent research projects relating to the History of Medicine, especially—but not restricted to—those based on unpublished primary sources.
A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages - front matter
A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages, 2021
The Middle Ages are well-known for the growth of universities and urban regulations, plague pandemics, increasingly sophisticated ways of causing injury in warfare, and abiding frameworks for health and illness provided by religion. Increasingly, however, archaeologists, historians and literary specialists have come together to flesh out the daily lives of medieval people at all levels of society, both in Christian Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages follows suit, but also brings new approaches and comparisons into the conversation. Through the investigation of poems, pottery, personal letters, recipes and petitions, and through a breadth of topics running from street-cleaning, cooking and amulets to religious treatises and death rituals, this volume accords new meaning and value to the period and those who lived it. Its chapters confirm that the study of latrines, patterns of manuscript circulation, miracle narratives, sermons, skeletons, metaphors and so on, have as much to tell us about attitudes towards health and illness as do medical texts. Delving within and beyond texts, and focusing on the sensory, the experiential, the personal, the body and the spirit, this volume celebrates and critiques the diverse and complex cultural history of medieval health and medicine.
2009
Hitherto peripheral (if not outright ignored) in general medieval historiography, medieval medical history is now a vibrant subdiscipline, one that is rightly attracting more and more attention from ‘mainstream’ historians and other students of cultural history. It does, however, have its particular characteristics, and understanding its source materials, methods, and analytical limitations may help those not trained in the field better navigate, explore and potentially contribute to its possibilities for illuminating the intersections of medicine and health with other aspects of medieval culture. Although this article focuses primarily on western Europe, many of its observations are also relevant to the Islamic world and Byzantium precisely because all three cultures shared many of the same intellectual traditions and social structures. The attached bibliography serves as a general introduction to the current state of the field.
In the preface to his Liber Vitae Putrum, Gregory of Tours asked the rhetorical question 'should we say the life or the lives of the saints?" The question is as urgent now as it was nearly fifteen hundred years ago. Since the early 1970s evidence drawn from hagiographical texts and from other manifestations of the cults of saints has permeated just about every nook and cranny of medieval studies, from magic and prostitution to death and burial.' The formation in 1990 of a Hagiography Society testifies to the huge interest in saints' cults among medievalists in all disciplines. And yet, something is lacking. The confident breadth of vision which enabled Reni Aigrain to write his L'Hugiogrupbie: ses Sources, ses Me'thodes, son Histoire in 1953 has been quite eroded by this flowering of interest in medieval hagiography. The recent surge of scholarly interest has produced almost no effort to replace Aigrain's work, nor any general historical synthesis of the cults of saints in the Middle Ages.3 Among the books and articles published since the mid-r98os, only David Rollason has been brave enough to attempt a synthesis of any sort, and that is an overview of recent work on saints' cults in Anglo-Saxon England.4 Rollason apart, the early Middle Ages currently suffers from a particularly acute attack of scholarly unease, whose primary symptom is a dispersal of effort into a rash of tightly focused articles and monographs. To what d o we refer our students to bridge the gap between the late antique cults of saints, as refocused by Peter Brown, and the high and late medieval traditions worked out most recently by Pierre-Andre Sigal, AndrC Vauchez and Caroline Bynum?' After examining in some detail ' 'Liber Vitae Patrum', pruef., in B.