Medical Texts in Manuscript Culture
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Medieval Academy of America
Organizer Name
Monica H. Green; Sara Ritchey
Organizer Affiliation
Arizona State Univ.; Univ. of Tennesee-Knoxville
Presider Name
Monica H. Green
Paper Title 1
How to Read Bodies: Medicine, Mary, and Miracles in an Anglo-Norman Manuscript
Presenter 1 Name
Winston Black
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Assumption College
Paper Title 2
Palliative Care for Life with Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 74
Presenter 2 Name
Amy V. Ogden
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Virginia
Paper Title 3
Healing through Words: Amulets, Formulae, and Spells in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts on Women's Health Care
Presenter 3 Name
Carmen Caballero Navas
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. de Granada
Start Date
11-5-2018 10:00 AM
Session Location
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
Description
This session, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America, is one of two sessions organized to develop and elaborate themes of the plenary address by Sara Ritchey, University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The panel seeks to illuminate the role of manuscripts in medieval approaches to medicine and healing. Recent scholarship has revealed how medieval readers engaged texts as active agents, demonstrating how the act of reading itself might unlock a text’s power to transform self and others. At the same time, scholarship has increasingly focused on the manuscript as an operative site in the healing process, either serving as an essential prop in a performance of medical authority or acting as a critical ingredient in a therapeutic recipe, as when a birthing girdle was placed on the hips of a parturient person. Scholars have also shown how the process of inscription, on bread, cheese, butter, or parchment, was understood to transfer healing power to the person who came into contact with it. Taking together these recent avenues of inquiry into verbal modes of healing and transformative action, this panel fosters a synthetic discussion of the place of the manuscript as an active object in the therapeutic process. The three papers imagine how compilational practices, scribal contingencies, and the reading “event” factored into medical practice and theory. How does attention to the manuscript open up new avenues for considering medicine, healing, and therapy in the Middle Ages? In what ways does verbal healing extend our view of the spectrum of medieval medical practitioners and specialties? How does this attention to the contingencies of the manuscript matrix disrupt our standardized models of medieval medicine?
Monica Green
Medical Texts in Manuscript Culture
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
This session, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America, is one of two sessions organized to develop and elaborate themes of the plenary address by Sara Ritchey, University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The panel seeks to illuminate the role of manuscripts in medieval approaches to medicine and healing. Recent scholarship has revealed how medieval readers engaged texts as active agents, demonstrating how the act of reading itself might unlock a text’s power to transform self and others. At the same time, scholarship has increasingly focused on the manuscript as an operative site in the healing process, either serving as an essential prop in a performance of medical authority or acting as a critical ingredient in a therapeutic recipe, as when a birthing girdle was placed on the hips of a parturient person. Scholars have also shown how the process of inscription, on bread, cheese, butter, or parchment, was understood to transfer healing power to the person who came into contact with it. Taking together these recent avenues of inquiry into verbal modes of healing and transformative action, this panel fosters a synthetic discussion of the place of the manuscript as an active object in the therapeutic process. The three papers imagine how compilational practices, scribal contingencies, and the reading “event” factored into medical practice and theory. How does attention to the manuscript open up new avenues for considering medicine, healing, and therapy in the Middle Ages? In what ways does verbal healing extend our view of the spectrum of medieval medical practitioners and specialties? How does this attention to the contingencies of the manuscript matrix disrupt our standardized models of medieval medicine?
Monica Green