Histoires genrées du corps et de la santé (1250-1550)

Gender(ed) Histories of Health, Healing and the Body, 1250-1550

International Workshop

Thursday, January 25 to Friday, January 26 2018

Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, Aachener Str. 217, 50931 Cologne 

Participation is free, to register please send an email to Eva Cersovky (cersovse@uni-koeln.de) by Friday, January 19, 2018.

This international workshop aims at systematically exploring the manifold relations between gender, health and healing during the 13th to 16th centuries, situating them at the nexus of medical, social, cultural, religious and economic concerns. Speakers focus on areas of the field which still require additional and more comprehensive attention with regard to gender, e.g. the household as a site of giving and receiving care but also of producing medicine, the healing and caring practices of religious women, the role of miscellanies or print in disseminating medical and bodily knowledge as well as perceptions of disability, infertility and age, to only name a few. Considering how distinct forms of healing were gendered in different texts and contexts and by different groups of people, speakers employ a wide variety of sources from a number of European countries as well as the Arabic world, ranging from medical treatise and recipes to hagiography and archival documents of practice as well as literary, visual and material sources. The workshop brings together historians from five countries, different disciplines and at all career stages, providing a forum for international discussion and reflection upon methodological and theoretical frameworks of the field. 

25 January 2018
10:00-10:30 am Welcome and Introduction: Eva-Maria Cersovsky and Ursula Gießmann (both Univ. of Cologne)

10:30-11:30 KEYNOTE: Sharon Strocchia (Emory Univ.): The Politics of Household Medicine at the Early Medici Court

11:30-11:45 Coffee Break

SESSION I: SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS HEALING
Chair: Sabine von Heusinger (Univ. of Cologne)

11:45-12:30 Sara M. Ritchey (Univ. of Tennessee): Foliated Healing: Miscellanies as Sources for Gendered Medical Practice in the Late Medieval Low Countries

12:30-13:15 Krisztina Ilko (Univ. of Cambridge): Friars, Women, and Saints. Investigating Healing Miracles of the Early Augustinian Beati

13:15-14:45 Lunch

14:45-15:30 Iliana Kandzha (Central European Univ. Budapest): Female Saints as Agents of Female Healing?: Issues of Gendered Practices and Patronage in the Cult of St Cunigunde (1200-1350)

SESSION II: PRODUCING, TRANSMITTING AND APPLYING KNOWLEDGE
Chair: Bernhard Hollick (Univ. of Cologne / GHI London)

15:30-16:15 Linda Ehrsam Voigts (Univ. of Missouri): Women and Medical Distillation at a Great Household in Late-Medieval England

16:15-16:45 Coffee Break

16:45-17:30 Belle S. Tuten (Juniata College): Care of the Breast in Late Medieval Medicine

17:30-18:15 Julia Gruman Martins (Univ. of London): Understanding/Controlling the Female Body in Ten Recipes: Print and the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge about Women in the Early
16th Century

26 January 2018
SESSION III: INFIRMITY AND CARE
Chair: Letha Böhringer (Univ. of Cologne)

09:00-09:45 am Donna Trembinski (St. Francis Xavier Univ.): At the Intersection of Sex and Gender: Infirm Masculinities and Femininities in the Thirteenth Century 

09:45-10:30 Cordula Nolte (Univ. of Bremen): Domestic Care in the 15th and 16th Centuries: Expectations, Experiences, and Practices from a Gendered Perspective

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-11:45 Eva-Maria Cersovsky (Univ. of Cologne): Ubi non est mulier, gemescit egens: Gendered Discourses of Care during the Later Middle Ages

SESSION IV: (IN)FERTILITY AND REPRODUCTION
Chair: Ursula Gießmann (Univ. of Cologne)

11:45-12:30 Catherine Rider (Univ. of Exeter): Gender, Old Age, and the Infertile Body in Medieval Medicine

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:15 Lauren Wood (Univ. of California): Si Non Caste Tamen Caute: Contraception and Abortion in the Middle Ages

14:15-15:00 Ayman Yasin Atat (TU Braunschweig): Dealing with Menstrual Disorders in Arabic/Ottoman Medicine

15:00-15:30 Concluding Discussion