ECR session on Medieval European Medical Manuscripts
Dear members, during this session we will hear from 2 PhD Candidates who are currently researching different aspects of Medieval European Medical Manuscripts.
Luthien Cangemi is a first year PhD student in Scandinavian Studies at UCL looking at Old Norse medical manuscripts. Previously Luthien studied 'The Role of Women in Old Norse Medicine' for an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge and a masters in “Medicine in the Medieval Germanic Tradition: Health, Body and Illness in the Old Norse language and Literature” at the University of Padova.
Læknir ok Lægbók: The Materia Medica in Old Norse Manuscripts
Located at the farther north of Medieval Europe, Iceland might have been geographically at the periphery of the Christendom but was certainly not isolated from a cultural viewpoint. Icelandic materia medica is one of the results of this cultural exchange, revealing a syncretism of local and foreign traditions, which includes but not limited to Classical medical treatments, Judeo-Christian formulas, and traditional elements such as runes, otherworldly beings and heathen gods.
This multitude of elements denounces a cultural encounter between the Continent and Iceland which affected local conceptions of health and illness. The re-negotiation of health and illness in the materia medica and the employment of certain remedies might help us to map a route of circulation of Mediterranean medical practices and theory in the North. Scholarship has convincingly argued for an Old-Danish-Norwegian route of circulation of medical practices in Medieval Iceland; however certain remedies seem to closely resemble the content of Old and Middle English medical miscellanies. In this paper, Luthien will address this lack in scholarship in an attempt to provide insights into a possible English-Norwegian stream of circulation of medical knowledge in Medieval Iceland.
Vanessa Da Silva Baptista is a third year part-time doctoral candidate with the UCL Department of History, London supervised by Professor Sophie Page. Her research focuses on magic tricks and chemical experiments as a form of domestic entertainment and play in the later Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in ideas of play, experimentation, entertainment, knowledge making and knowledge recording.
Her paper will introduce magic tricks as a category of medieval recipe literature in fourteenth and fifteenth century medieval manuscripts. It pays particular attention to the medical manuscripts that collected magic tricks to determine what types of magic tricks medical practitioners collected and why.
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