Premodern Healthscaping

International Symposium (online)

18-19 June, 17:30-19:00 (Lisbon time)

This seminar aims to be a space for knowledge sharing on the theme of epidemics, in different geographical contexts, national and foreign, limited to the Middle and Early Modern Ages, seeking to establish a bridge between the past and the present. It will be held in two days and consists of brief presentations (10 min.) carried out by invited researchers, followed by a debate, and open to all those interested in participating.

The new coronavirus (SARS-CoV 2) and COVID-19 brought unexpected challenges to Humanity. The answer to these challenges is more than a quest for biomedical science and transcends health issues. In this context and seeking complementarity between health sciences and the emerging field of health humanities, this Symposium is promoted, which aims to recourse to historical knowledge to understand and help to live the difficult present time.

This role attributed to the humanities and historical studies has been highlighted in recent months in various initiatives (webinars, online conferences, special magazine numbers, interviews, opinion articles) carried out by various institutions and civil society, and in several countries.

This proposal is a joint initiative of two ongoing hospital and health history research projects: Hospitalis: Hospital architecture in Portugal (PTDC/ART-HIS/30808/2017)  (IR: Joana Balsa de Pinho; European Institute Culture Science Padre Manuel Antunes; ARTIS – Institute of History of Art, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon) and Royal Hospital of All Saints: the city and health (IR’s: André Teixeira, Edite Martins Alberto, Rodrigo Banha da Silva; DPC-Lisbon City Council, CHAM – Center for Humanities, NOVA FCSH).

The event will be broadcast on CHAM’s YouTube channel:
June 18: https://youtu.be/txfwRs-4cio
June 19: https://youtu.be/fHfFQFBh0YI

Healthscaping team members Clair Weeda and Janna Coomans will present The Second Plague Pandemic: Mobility and Bottlenecks in Netherlandish Cities in the symposium on 19 June.

You can read more about the symposium and its programme here.

Online Workshop with Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Thursday, 28 May 2020, 15:00-17:00 (CEST)

How can we begin to think about transmissions of medical knowledge in medieval Eurasia? What type of work can be done in order to engage with this question? Can the “Silk Road” help us to engage with this question?
This workshop will discuss some of the directions these questions raise. We will begin our discussion with some of the points I made in “The Silk-Roads as a model for exploring Eurasian transmissions of medical knowledge: views from the Tibetan medical manuscripts of Dunhuang,” (in: Pamela Smith, ed., Entangled Itineraries of Materials, Practices, and Knowledge: Eurasian Nodes of convergence and transformation, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, pp. 47-62), and continue with some of the broader questions which this chapter raises.

Note:
– If anyone needs a PDF of this chapter, please email: r.yoeli-tlalim@gold.ac.uk
– To register and receive the link to the online workshop, please send an email to premodern.healthscaping@gmail.com

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim is a Reader in the History Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research deals with the history of Asian medicine and the transmission of medical knowledge along the so-called ‘Silk-Roads’, looking at ways in which Asian and European medical knowledge have been interacting. Yoeli-Tlalim has co-edited three volumes with Anna Akasoy and Charles Burnett: Rashīd al-Dīn as an Agent and Mediator of Cultural Exchanges in Ilkhanid Iran (2013); Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes (2011) and Astro-Medicine: Astrology and Medicine, East and West (2008). She has also co-edited (with Vivienne Lo) the Silk Roads Special Issue of Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (2007). Her book ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Roads, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (2021). She is a member of the Translating Medicine in the Premodern World working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Thursday 23 April 2020, 08:00 CET
Seminar on Zoom

Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program seminar

Professor Guy Geltner Professor of Medieval History Monash University

Hinterlands’ role in the growth of cities emerges from a unique metabolic perspective and with rare lucidity thanks to the records of Piedmontese field wardens (campari) from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Throughout the region enclosed by Italy’s Alpine ridges, these officials policed numerous sites and species in the service of cities’ biological as well as political agendas, as urban dwellers came to see the surrounding countryside, not only as a security belt providing military defense, but also as a rich source of caloric and hydraulic energy and a sink for waste. Reconstructing campari’s remits, norms and actions thus recovers a neglected urban gaze grounded in the era’s environmental thinking. Yet the process also sheds light on the tactics that rustics devised to obstruct it, for instance through self-help, concealment and strategic embellishment of reported violations. Campari records thus challenge the centrality of landed aristocracies in the area’s and era’s political historiography, while simultaneously inviting social and urban historians to look beyond the city walls.

Professor Geltner is the author of Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019), Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present (Amsterdam University Press, 2014), The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance and Remembrance (Oxford University Press 2012), The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton University Press 2008, Italian ed. 2012), and numerous articles in English and in French on the mendicant orders, public health, crime, and punishment. He takes up the position of Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at Monash University on 1st March 2020.

For further information, please contact Prof. Christopher Ocker at IRCI, chris.ocker@acu.edu.au

Friday, 24 April 2020, 09:00-17:00
Monash Club, 32 Exhibition Walk, Monash University, Clayton Campus

The preservation of health and the pursuit of wellness were major preoccupations during the Medieval and Renaissance period. This was not limited to just the body but also to the mind, the soul, the community and the environment. As a complex subject that affected everybody, the quest for wellbeing was understood and experienced in a multitude of ways. This symposium aims to explore both the changing and continuing perceptions of wellbeing during the medieval and early modern period as well as the various strategies people employed to pursue it for themselves and for others.

Keynote Speaker

Professor Guy Geltner (Monash University)
“Health and the Environment Beyond the Simplex of the Pre”

Speakers

Dr Michael Barbezat (The Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University)
Elizabeth Burrell (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Monash University)
Dr Merav Carmeli (Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University)
Nat Cutter (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne)
Jacqueline Mahoney (School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University)
Dr Melissa Raine (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne)
Dr Kathryn Smithies (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne)
Dr Richard Tait (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Monash University)
Gordon Whyte (Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University)