A new open access article has been published. “The plague of 1720 and migration in Martigues (France) in the 17th and 18th centuries” by Pierre Darlu and Isabelle Séguy. The study helps us understand how epidemics can affect the evolution of a population on a local scale.
Find it here: click.
The next meeting of ‘Medieval European Medical Manuscripts’ of the CHSTM is on April 23.
Melissa Reynolds (Texas Christian University) will be speaking on ‘The Material Culture of Later Medieval English Medicine’.
Find more information here: click.
Abstract:
Beginning in the later fourteenth century in England medical texts that had long circulated among the clerical classes in Latin compendia were translated into the vernacular for both lay and less educated clerical readers. The material evidence of this shift in the circulation and reception of medical knowledge is captured in the hundreds of vernacular medical manuscripts that survive in various archives and libraries, most of which have been carefully catalogued by Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz in their database of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English. This talk shares research from my recent book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (Chicago, 2024), which builds from the work of Voigts and Kurtz to reconstruct the experiences of scores of later medieval English readers whose medical manuscripts were treasured resources for making sense of the vicissitudes of their bodies, their health, and the natural world. By examining reader marks, patterns of illustration, and repetitions of recipes and treatises, I trace how ordinary English people’s relationship to books and to experiential authority transformed over a century of increasing engagement with medical knowledge, captured in the particular material form of the vernacular manuscript.
