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New book – Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times – ed. by Lynteris, Christos – Palgrave Macmillan

Presents a history of plague, bringing together scholars from early modern and modern history as well as anthropologists working on plague in historical and contemporary contexts

Examines the visual record of the plague and explores the relationship between the epidemic image and human imagination

Integrates geographical perspectives beyond the usual Eurocentric plague frame, appealing to scholars of global history and colonialism

This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.

More info on the editor website

New book – Donna Trembinski, Illness and Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi, University of Toronton Press, 2020.

Illness and Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi, University of Toronton Press, 2020.

Illness and Authority examines the lived experience and early stories about St. Francis of Assisi through the lens of disability studies. This new approach re-centres Francis’s illnesses and infirmities and highlights how they became barriers to wielding traditional modes of masculine authority within both the Franciscan Order he founded and the church hierarchy. So concerned were members of the Franciscan leadership that the future saint was compelled to seek out medical treatment and spent the last two years of his life in the nearly constant care of doctors. Unlike other studies of Francis’s ailments, Illness and Authority focuses on the impact of his illnesses on his autonomy and secular power, rather than his spiritual authority.

From downplaying the comfort Francis received from music to disappearing doctors in the narratives of his life, early biographers worked to minimize the realities of his infirmities. When they could not do so, they turned the saint’s experiences into teachable moments that demonstrated his saintly and steadfast devotion and his trust in God. Illness and Authority explores the struggles that early authors of Francis’s vitae experienced as they tried to make sense of a saint whose life did not fit the traditional rhythms of a founder-saint.

  • Page Count: 272 pages
  • Dimensions: 6.2in x 1.0in x 9.1in

More information on the editor website

 

CFP – Illness as Metaphor in the Latin Middle Ages – Leeds International Medieval Congress 2021

… et sermo eorum ut cancer serpit (2 Tim 2:17)

Susan Sontag hoped her thought-provoking essay Illness as Metaphor (1978) to contribute to the „elucidation (…) and liberation” from metaphors in both social attitudes to illness and its individual experience. Although we can hardly think our existence without resorting to metaphorical language, critical analysis may help to understand how and to what extent the contemporary discourse is shaped by the historical figures of disease. This seems all the more important as this imagery will certainly stay with us in the post-pandemic world.

The session seeks to provide a forum for scholars to reflect on the variation and functions of metaphors of illness in the Latin writing of the Middle Ages. We encourage papers that investigate how the imagery of morbus, pestilentia, gangraena etc. structured individual experience and how it shaped self-knowledge and practices of communities. We invite original contributions that critically examine the role that Latin metaphors of illness played in medieval discourse as a tool of explaining reality and as a rhetorical device used to impose specific world views.

Questions we would like to suggest include, but are not limited to:

  • What was the scope of the metaphors? Which fields of individual experience and social life in the Middle Ages were particularly represented in terms of illness?
  • What are the sources, prototypical examples and creative uses of the figures of disease in medieval Latin texts?
  • How did the use of metaphors vary across text genres, times and space?
  • To what aims did medieval Latin writers employ metaphors of illness? What was their role in persuasive writing (religious and political polemics, preaching etc.)?• Could metaphorical discourse shape social attitudes in the Middle Ages? Which aspects of the reality did medieval metaphors highlight and which did they hide?
  • How was the imagery of disease employed in explaining natural and social phenomena? What was its role in structuring individual (religious, emotional etc.) experience?

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Krzysztof Nowak (krzysztof.nowak@ijp.pan.pl) by the 10th of September 2020. Unfortunately, the project cannot cover congress fees or expenses incurred by the session participants.

Session Sponsor Project eFontes. The electronic corpus of Polish medieval Latin (https://scriptores.pl/efontes)

Session Organizer Krzysztof Nowak, Department of Medieval Latin
Institute of Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences)

More on Scriptores website

CFP – In Sickness and in Health: Pestilence, Disease, and Healing in Medieval and Early Modern Art – 14th Annual Imago Conference, University of Haifa, January 12, 2021

In light of the global turmoil caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, the 14th Annual Imago conference will examine the cultural and artistic impact of epidemics, diseases, and healing in the art of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. We hope this examination will not only shed new light on the artistic, social, and political mechanisms of both of these periods, but will also produce fresh insights into cultural and artistic responses to the current global health crisis.

Disease is an inevitable part of the human experience. Whether in times of acute crisis, the most familiar of which is the Black Death of the mid-14th century, or as a constant threat at all other times, diseases evoked varied responses, from theological formulations to the transmission of medicinal knowledge; and, not least, to artistic depictions.

We invite papers from broad and diverse points of view: case studies of iconographies dealing with disease or healing, studies of the artistic responses to specific epidemics, and comparative studies between East and West, the Christian and the Islamic worlds, etc. Interdisciplinary studies and those engaging with the production, reception, and interpretation of art concerned with disease and healing are of particular interest. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

· Artistic expressions of medicinal practices

· Visual components in medical manuscripts

· Artistic responses to the Black Death and to other epidemics

· Physical and spiritual health – Medieval and Early Modern expressions

· Disease and otherness – xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic polemical visual expressions

· Disease – theological and moral conceptions

· Gendered aspects of disease and healing

· Disease and healing between East and West – artistic expressions

· Leprosy and its cultural and artistic representations

· Saints, relics, pilgrimage, and healing

· Disease and apotropaic practices

· Places of sickness and death: art in hospitals and cemeteries

· Images of doctors and nurses

· Representations of suffering and sickness

The conference will take place on January 12, 2021, at the University of Haifa.

* Should the ongoing Covid-19 situation prevent the conference from being held on campus, it will be held online via Zoom.

* All speakers will be allowed to deliver their paper via Zoom, even if the conference will take place physically on campus.

*We will broadcast the entire conference to participants via Zoom.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Dr. Gil Fishhof (gfishhof@staff.haifa.ac.il) no later than September 1st,2020. Abstracts should include the applicant’s name, professional affiliation, and a short CV. Each paper should be limited to a 20-minute presentation, to be followed by a discussion and questions. All applicants will be notified by October 1st 2020 regarding acceptance of their proposal. For additional information or further inquiries, please contact Dr. Fishhof.

Organizing committee: Dr. Gil Fishhof, Ms. Mazi Kuzi, Prof. Jochai Rosen, Dr. Margo Stroumsa-Uzan.

Draft program conference – Reconsidering Illness and Recovery in the Early Modern World Online Conference 2020 – An interdisciplinary virtual conference for the history of health, medicine and disease – org. by Rachel Clamp and Claire Turner – 18 and 19 August 2020

RECONSIDERING ILLNESS AND RECOVERY IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD 

Funded by the Durham University Centre for Academic Development

Sponsored by Oxford University Press and Yale University Press

 

With many conferences being cancelled or postponed due to COVID-19, Rachel Clamp (Durham University) and Claire Turner (University of Leeds) have decided to hold an online interdisciplinary conference. Their aim is to provide a space for scholars at all stages of their careers to discuss and share their work with the wider academic community.

The virtual conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to reconsider the role of health, illness, and recovery in the early modern world in light of the current crisis. These topics sit at the intersection of some of the most significant themes in early modern history and are particularly relevant today. The ways in which contemporaries interpreted, represented, monitored, controlled and ultimately recovered from illness have broad implications for the study of science, medicine, religion, art, literature and so much more.

DAY 1
Tuesday, 18th August 1-4pm (BST)


PANEL ONE: EPIDEMIC AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE 1PM – 2PM
Aaron Columbus, Birkbeck, University of London
‘For the better observing of order during this tyme of the contagious infection’: The response of parish government to plague in the suburban environs of London c.1600 – 1650
Marina Iní, University of Cambridge
Quarantine and plague prevention: lazzaretti in the early modern Mediterranean Lorna Lorna Giltrow-Shaw, University of Birmingham
‘Death…dogs them into their own houses’: The pestilential pooch in the col aborative play The Witch of Edmonton


PANEL TWO: MEDICAL ENCOUNTERS AND INTERVENTIONS 2PM – 3PM
Nat Cutter, University of Melbourne
The First Misery of Barbary: Plague, Medicine, Recovery and Death for British Expatriates in the Ottoman Maghreb, 1660 – 1710
Maggie Bell, Assistant Curator, Norton Simon Museum
Looking Exercises: Salutary Effects of Images in the Central Ward of Santa Maria del a Helen Esfandiary, King’s College London
Managing Smal pox: Elite Georgian Mothers and the Making of an English Method of Innoculation

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION 3PM – 4PM
Professor John Henderson, Birkbeck, University of London
Imagining the Great Pox in Renaissance Italy: Patients, symptoms and treatment

 

DAY 2
Wednesday, 19th August 1-3pm (BST)


PANEL THREE: IDEALS OF HEALTH AND RECOVERY 1PM – 2PM
Emma Marshall, University of York
People, Place and Power: Re-Evaluating Domestic Healthcare
Dr Ninon Dubourg, University of Paris
Disabling Consequences of Il nesses on Clerics’ Recruitment in 1459: (Re-)Inclusion of Disabled People within the Church by Pius I
Amie Bolissian Mcrae, University of Reading
‘A conservative cure in respect of Age’: The Contingent Nature of Recovery for Early Modern Ageing Patients’


KEYNOTE PRESENTATION 2PM – 3PM
Dr Hannah Newton, University of Reading
Inside the Sick Chamber: The History of Il ness in Six Objects To register to attend the conference send an email to illnessandrecovery@gmail.com by Monday 16 August or visit our website https://illnessandrecoveryconference.wordpress.com

Clik here for more information