Santé et médecine dans l'Ouest médiéval

Health and Medicine in the Early Medieval West

Call for papers

IMC Leeds 2017

We are inviting papers for sessions at IMC Leeds 2017 on Health and Medicine in the Early Medieval West. Despite important new work, early medieval medicine still remains quarantined from the mainstream of early medieval historiography. The aim of these sessions is to diagnose and treat this historiographical “otherness” by bringing health and medicine into conversation with other areas of early medieval historiography, and by using health and medicine as ways of exploring early medieval societies.

Papers on post-Roman, pre-university medicine and/or health from c.500-c.1000 are welcomed on any of the following themes:

a) Situating medical texts and traditions

Possible topics: what counts (and counted) as a medical text/tradition in the early middle ages; continuation of, adaptation of or deviation from medical traditions; manuscript contexts of medical texts; authors and audiences; social, political and/or intellectual contexts of medical learning.

b) Medical ideas outside medical texts

Possible topics: migration of ideas within or outside medical texts; bibliographical evidence (e.g. library catalogues) for medical learning; medical learning and the laity; medical metaphors; health and medicine in pastoral rhetoric; liturgy as medicinal.

c) Moving beyond texts

Possible topics: interdisciplinary approaches to early medieval health; use of aDNA, palaeopathology and bioarchaeology; material culture of health; comparative history.

d) Humans and other animals

Possible topics: animal products in medical practice; health implications of interactions between humans and animals; analogies between human and animal medicine; veterinary medicine.

If interested, please send your details, paper title and an informal abstract to Zubin Mistry (zubin.mistry@ed.ac.uk) and Claire Burridge (cpsb2@cam.ac.uk) by Friday 9th September. Please get in touch if you have any questions and please do pass on the CFP to anyone who may be interested.