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New Book – “Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages”, ed. by Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability—medieval and otherwise—with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

Table of content:

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Medieval Disability beyond the Sin-Sanctity Binary
Part I: Disabled Saints
1. Francis’ Disappearing Infirmities: Disability and the Expectations of Masculine Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century
2. The Paradoxes of Margaret the Lame: Disability and Authorial Work in Thirteenth-Century Magdeburg
3. Perspectives on Blindness, Deafness, and Muteness in the Chinese Eminent Monks Literature: The ‘Eight Difficulties’ in Context
4. Perfect Disabled Embodiment: Gelongma Palmo in the Tibetan Buddhist Hagiographies
5. Writing Sanctity Upon the Body: The Healed Wounds of St Æthelthryth and St Edmund
6. Sacred Spectacles? Eyeglasses, Iconography and the Holy Body Part II: Saints and the Disability Community
7. The Socio-Economic Value of Healing Miracles in the Liber Miraculorum s. Fidis
8. Disability and Healing Touch in Representations of the Midwife with the Withered Hands in Late Medieval Books of Hours
9. Holy Women and Leprosy: Communities of Care
10. Healing the Unborn: Natal Disability and the Old English Life of St Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii
Epilogue: Curative Time and Crip Ancestorship
Index

Source : Amsterdam University Press

CFP – Histories of Disability and Emotions – An International Online Conference Hosted by KU Leuven and the University of Liège, Belgium, 13-15 June 2023

Histories of Disability and Emotions

An International Online Conference Hosted by KU Leuven and the University of Liège, Belgium, 13-15 June 2023

 

The history of disability and the history of emotions are now well-established fields of research. They have experienced relatively similar debates and methodological developments, and they have strong, if complicated, ties to the history of medicine. But despite their similarities, these two fields have only recently started to intersect. In his 2016 article “Disability History and the History of Emotions: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Britain”, David M. Turner explored “ways in which history’s ‘emotional turn’ can shed light on disability in the past,” and suggested that we steer away from focusing on “sympathy” and “pity.” Yet, to date there is still relatively little historical research on the connections between disability and emotions.

We welcome proposals for 20-minutes presentations that analyze the emotions experienced by disabled people and/or communal emotions evoked by disabilities in different societies and cultures worldwide throughout history. We expect that the concepts of “disability” and “emotions” themselves may have different meanings than today. Proposals may address, but need not be limited to, the following broad topics: 1) Emotional lives of disabled people, including expressions of joy, pride, satisfaction, pain, shame, fear, sadness, etc.; the interaction of disability with emotional norms; the use of empathy as a social weapon; 2) Emotional reactions to disability by others (love, trust, compassion, fear, disgust, derision, etc.); 3) Analyses of the educational trajectories (formal as well as informal) leading to the constitution of particular emotions/emotional subjectivities; 4) disability and emotions in art history.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to the conference organizers, Ninon Dubourg (ninon.dubourg@gmail.com), Sara Scalenghe (sscalenghe@loyola.edu), and Pieter Verstraete (pieter.verstraete@kuleuven.be) by February 1, 2023. Accepted contributors will be notified by February 15. Drafts of papers will be due on May 15. The conference will take place entirely online. After the conference, contributors will be invited to apply to participate in a smaller hybrid workshop in Leuven and Liège in the fall of 2023 that will result in a peer-reviewed edited volume and/or special journal issue.

 

New book – Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World, Perspectives from across the Mediterranean and Beyond, Edited by Lori Jones and Nükhet Varlık for Boydell & Breyer

DESCRIPTION

This collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease, across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions.

Across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions shared inherited medical paradigms containing similar healthy living precepts and attitudes toward body, illness and mortality. Yet, as the chapters collected here demonstrate, customs of diagnosing, explaining and coping with disease and death often diverged with respect to knowledge and practice.
Offering a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad selection of material emerging from England to the Persian Gulf, the volume reaches across conventional disciplinary and historiographical boundaries. Plague diagnoses in pre-Black Death Arabic medical texts, rare, illustrated phlebotomy instructions for plague patients, and a Jewish plague tract utilising the Torah as medicine reflect critical re-examinations of primary sources long thought to have nothing new to offer. Novel re-interpretations of Giovanni Villani’s “New Chronicle”, canonisation inquests and saints’ lives offer fresh considerations of medieval constructions of epidemics, disabilities, and the interplay between secular and spiritual healing. Cross-disciplinary perspectives recast late medieval post-mortem diagnoses in Milan as a juridical – rather than strictly medical – practice, highlight the aural performativity of the Franciscan deathbed liturgy, explore the long evolution of lapidary treatments for paediatric and obstetric diseases and thrust us into the Ottoman polychromatic sensory world of disease and death. Finally, considerations of the contributions of modern science alongside historical primary sources generates important new ways to understand death and disease in the past. Overall, the contributions juxtapose and interlace similarities and differences in their local and historical contexts, while highlighting and nuancing some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease – two historiographical subfields long approached separately.

Content

 
Intersections: Disease and Death, Medicine and Religion, Medieval and Early Modern
LORI JONES, NÜKHET VARLIK AND WINSTON BLACK

PART I: DIAGNOSING, EXPLAINING AND RECORDING

1 Knowing the Signs of Disease: Plague in the Arabic Medical Commentaries between the First and Second Pandemics
NAHYAN FANCY

2 The Legal Foundations of Post-Mortem Diagnosis in Later Medieval Milan
ANN G. CARMICHAEL

3 Epidemic Illness in the Last Book of Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle, 1345-1348: Warfare, Sin and the Heavens
NICOLE ARCHAMBEAU

4 Colours of Disease and Death in the Early Modern Ottoman Cultural Imagination
NÜKHET VARLIK

PART II: COPING, PREVENTING AND HEALING

5 The Role of Music in a Franciscan Liturgy for the End of Life, as Evidenced in Manuscript Newberry 24
ELAINE STRATTON HILD

6 Medical and Spiritual Healing of Death and Disease in Medieval Miracle Stories
JENNIFER C. EDWARDS

7 Infirmity and Death-Wishes in Medieval French and Italian Canonisation Processes
JENNI KUULIALA

8 Bubo Men? Repurposing Medieval Anatomic Illustrations for Plague Therapy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
LORI JONES

9 Psalm 38 as Plague Diagnostic and Prophylactic in Abraham Yagel’s Moshi’ah Ḥosim (1587)
ANDREW BERNS

10 The Protection of Innocents: Red Coral as a Lapidary Cure for the ‘Children’s Disease’ and Conditions Related to Childbirth in Medieval and Early Modern England
NICHOLA E. HARRIS

PART III: STUDYING, ANALYSING AND INTERPRETING

11 Leprosy in Medieval Europe: An Immunological and Syndemic Approach
FABIAN CRESPO

12 Past Plagues: On the Synergies of Genetic and Historical Interpretations of Infectious Disease
HENDRIK POINAR

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
 

Authors

Lori Jones is a medical historian at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses primarily on plague texts and images.

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research focuses on disease, death, medicine and public health in the Ottoman Empire.

New book – “Un regard pour entendre, Sourds et surdité dans l’Occident du Bas Moyen-Âge (XIIIe-XVe siècles)”, by Thomas Rodot, pub. by l’Harmattan

La surdité au Moyen Âge est marquée par l’absence d’une étude d’ampleur, ce qui facilite la diffusion de stéréotypes dépeignant des sourds stigmatisés et des sociétés intolérantes. L’objectif de cet ouvrage est de répondre à cette carence, de déconstruire les visions fantasmées et de nourrir les réflexions sur un sujet encore méconnu. Quels sont les causes et les remèdes attribués à la surdité ? Comment les sourds sont-ils perçus et quels comportements sont entretenus à leur égard ? De quels droits bénéficient-ils et à quels interdits doivent-ils faire face ? Par l’étude des discours médicaux, religieux et juridiques, l’ouvrage explore les représentations et les réalités des sourds afin d’évaluer leur intégration dans les sociétés occidentales de la fin du Moyen Âge.

  • Date de publication : 24 août 2022
  • Broché – format : 15,5 x 24 cm • 242 pages
  • ISBN : 978-2-14-028450-2
  • EAN13 : 9782140284502
  • EAN PDF : 9782140284519
  • (Imprimé en France)

More information on the editor’s website

CFP – ICMS Kalamazoo – Roundtable on Medieval Disability, Modern Ableism, org. by Alison Purnell

Roundtable Session for ICMS 2023
May 11-13

With the growth of disability as an area of interest for medievalists, it is imperative for scholars to interrogate their assumptions around ability, disability, normativity, monstrousness, and embodiment, Traditional modes of scholarly conversation are frequently inaccessible to those with somatic learning, and sensory sables. Writing about disability without engaging our implicit biases can result in ahistorical and inaccurate scholarship {that perpetuates harm within academia and in public outreach.

‘This roundtable invites conversation about ableism within medieval disability studies in an effort to increase awareness that the disabled “them” often include “us”

Topics for discussion may include any aspect of how ableism impacts medieval disability Scholarship, from the specific to the conceptual, including but not limited to:

  • addressing ableism in past scholarship
  • writing within an anti-ableism framework
  • access issues faced by students, instructors, and/or faculty
  • widening access creatively
  • scholarship that is inaccessible to the population it discusses
  • Sensitivity reading

Scholars who identify as disabled are particularly encouraged to participate and priority will be given to disabled voices, but non-disabled scholars are also welcome.

Individual speakers are requested to prepare 8-10 minute talk, which will be followed by
open discussion. This session has been awarded one of the “hybrid” session slots with the
recognition that disabled scholars may face extra barriers to participation in person, Please
indicate in Your proposal whether you expect to present in person or remotely

Please submit proposals by Sept 15, 2022 via the ICMS Confex proposal portal at
ttpss/ñcms.confex.comviems/2023/efp.cgi

For questions or further information, contact Alison Purnell (ampurnel@uwaterloo.ca).