Efficacy in Early Modern Healing
Call for papers
Conference
Organisers: Emma Spary, Philippa Carter, Dániel Margócsy
Date 13—14 September 2024
This symposium seeks to bring together scholars working on the many ways in which early modern people discussed, used, accepted or dismissed efficacy claims. The question of medical efficacy—of how and why cures worked—stands at the intersection between several fields of enquiry into early modern history. Recent literature has underscored the ways in which religious conflict problematised the spiritual and medicinal efficacy inherent in material objects such as devotional items. Historians of both early modern magic and religion have addressed the problem of efficacious action between the natural and the supernatural, but often from different perspectives. Within the history of the sciences, new models of both matter and spirit have been discussed by both supporters and critics of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ model. Within the histories of medicine, pharmacy and consumption, efficacy has often been invoked to explain how foods and drugs moved between cultures worldwide, while recent studies of the household have increased the number of ‘efficacious things’ among the growing number of possessions that probate inventories documented. Commitment throughout the early modern period to the presence of virtues in healing matter meant that many drugs operated on a sacred as well as material plane.
Various forms of social, epistemological and theological commitments and divides grew up around debates over efficacy. This symposium presents efficacy as a common theme linking all these domains, and raising similar questions in each case. How far did arguments for the healing efficacy of particular substances correlate with social status, faith, occupation or gender? How did such arguments change as new definitions of religious orthodoxy, new social geographies of spiritual power, or new scientific ontologies arose over the early modern period? Models of greater or lesser rationality, or of transhistorical properties inherent in matter, have often been historians’ default explanation for how these tricky questions over efficacy were settled. But such accounts prove unsustainable in cases like the amulet, an object of small size carried on the body to defend against poison and disease, which continued to be defended by Royal Society Fellow Robert Boyle as part of a corpuscular philosophy more usually associated with Scientific Revolution narratives. Judgements about efficacy invariably entailed claims about ontology, the distribution of natural and supernatural powers within the cosmos, the nature of disease, and the power of bodies to act at a distance. Scientific and medical investigation of efficacy had implications for theological debates over how the Eucharist worked, and the ways in which grace, charity and virtue spread through society. Early modern accounts of efficacy trafficked between natural and supernatural, sacred and profane, matter and spirit, and for this reason elude material-deterministic explanations.
The early modern period also marked transformations in what was considered to possess efficacy. Colours, gemstones, and human body parts commonly featured as ingredients in collections of efficacious cures as far back as antiquity, like the red thread to be used to bind a hoopoe’s legs. In medicine, magic and religion, the early modern period was a time of transformation in the power of words to act upon matter, exemplified in love magic’s frequent recourse to incantations and spells. Yet by the period’s end, words and even many formerly healing objects were beginning to shed their attributed power, in a change that is poorly explained by recourse to a ‘decline of magic’. A second transformation arose from shifts in global trade, which gave more people access to exotic materials. In the process, these substances transformed from powerful and prized secrets into quotidian consumables, changing along with the powers attributed to colonial spaces.
We invite proposals for papers engaging with the conference’s themes. Areas of interest include the history of medicine, theatre, religion, material culture, natural philosophy, collecting, courts, empires, households, environments, drugs, intoxicants and more.
Please submit a title, abstract of c.200-250 words and contact details to: efficacy2024@outlook.com
Deadline for paper proposals: 7 June 2024
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