Gender(ed) Histories of Health, Healing and the Body, 1250 – 1550
Cologne, 25.-26.01.2018
Gender-specific characteristics and challenges within medicine and public health play an increasingly important role in current medical research as well as politics. Incorporating gender into medieval history, too, reveals its importance in organising and practising health care, interpreting the diseased, disabled or infertile body as well as producing, applying and transmitting medical knowledge.
The international workshop aimed at systematically exploring these manifold relations between gender, health and healing during the 13th to 16th centuries, situating them at the nexus of medical, social, cultural, religious and economic concerns. Considering how distinct forms of healing were gendered in different texts and contexts and by different groups of people, speakers employed a wide variety of sources from a number of European countries as well as the Arabic world, ranging from medical treatise and recipes to hagiography and archival documents of practice as well as literary, visual and material sources. The workshop brought together historians from five countries, different disciplines and at all career stages, providing a forum for international discussion and reflection upon methodological and theoretical frameworks of the field.
Organizers:
Eva-Maria Cersovsky (cersovse@uni-koeln.de)
Dr. Ursula Gießmann (Ursula.giessmann@uni-koeln.de)