CFP: The Health of the Realm: The Historical Context of Medicine in the Early Middle Ages

IMC Leeds 7-10 July 2014

While interest in medicine and medical texts has been growing in recent years, its historical context has largely been neglected. Illness and treatment do not exist in a vacuum: just as chronic stomach pain finds a place alongside Byzantine diplomacy and the Lombard threat in the letters of Gregory the Great, so the Anglo-Saxon Bald's Leechbook transcribes a remedy sent to a sick King Alfred, and Bede records the plague that brought the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow to its knees. Medical texts were the product of the circumstances, anxieties, and philosophies of their times, just as the times were shaped by the health of those who lived them.

This session hopes to explore the historical framework of illness, care, and the transmission of medical knowledge. We are looking for papers on any aspect of early medieval medicine that draws on broader themes, on topics including but not limited to:

- Cultural relations and the transmission of texts
- Trade and the market for materia medica
- The economy of medical care
- Transmission
- Vernacular and Latin sources
- Linguistic development and medical texts
- Leadership and Illness
- Death and illness, 'the Great Levellers'
- Soul, body, and the Church

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to Christine Voth by September 10, 2013