OUT NOW: Wounds in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr (Ashgate, 2014)

A new collection of essays on wounds and wound treatment in the Middle Ages, co-edited by our president, Cordelia Warr, and including an essay by our treasurer, Hannah Priest.

Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the middle ages, paired chapters explore key themes situating wounds within the context of religious belief, writing on medicine, status and identity, and surgical practice. The final chapter reviews the history of medieval wounding through the modern imagination.

Adopting an innovative approach to the subject, this book will appeal to all those interested in how past societies regarded health, disease and healing and will improve knowledge of not only the practice of medicine in the past, but also of the ethical, religious and cultural dimensions structuring that practice.

Contents:

Part I: Medical Overview

1. The Management of Military Wounds in the Middle Ages
Jon Clasper

Part II: Miraculous Wounds and Miraculous Healing

2. Changing Stigmata
Cordelia Warr

3. Miracle and Medicine: Conceptions of Medical Knowledge and Practice in Thirteenth-Century Miracle Accounts
Louise Elizabeth Wilson

Part III: The Broken Body and the Broken Soul

4. The Solution of Continuous Things: Wounds in Late Medieval Medicine and Surgery
Karine van 't Land

5. Medicine for the Wounded Soul
M.K.K. Yearl

Part IV: Wounds as Signifiers for Romance Man and Civil Man

6. Christ's Wounds and the Birth of Romance
Hannah Priest

7. Wounding in the High Middle Ages: Law and Practice
Jenny Benham

Part V: Wound Surgery in the Fourteenth Century

8. Medicines for Surgical Practice in Fourteenth-Century England: The Judgement Against John le Spicer
Ian Naylor

9. The Medical Crossbow from Jan Yperman to Isaak Koedijck
Maria Patijn

Part VI: The Modern Imagination

10. The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination
Lila Yawn

About the Editor: Dr Anne Kirkham is a research associate at the University of Manchester. She obtained her PhD in 2007 and has published an article on St Francis of Assisi in Revival and Resurgence in Christian History (Studies in Church History, vol. 44, 2008). Since 2008, she has taught in the department of Art History and Visual Studies and researched, with Cordelia Warr, medieval wounds and has also co-supervised medical students researching dissertations in the history of medieval medicine.

Dr Cordelia Warr is senior lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has published on Dressing for Heaven (2010), has co-edited two books on art in Naples with Janis Elliot (The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina, 2004, and Art and Architecture in Naples, 1266-1714, 2010), and is currently working on the representation of stigmata between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.

For more information about the book, please visit the publishers' website.

Impossible Spaces Book Launch

Details of a book launch in Manchester - a new collection of short stories including pieces by two of the medievalists at the University of Manchester (Dr. Hannah Priest, writing as Hannah Kate, and PhD student Daisy Black).

Friday 19 July, 7.00-9.00pm
Free entry

International Anthony Burgess Foundation
3 Cambridge Street
Manchester M1 5BY
United Kingdom

Join us at the launch of Impossible Spaces, a new collection of short stories from Hic Dragones.

Sometimes the rules can change. Sometimes things aren't how they appear. Sometimes you can just slip through the cracks and end up... somewhere else. What else is there? Is there somewhere else, right beside you, if you could only reach out and touch it? Or is it waiting to reach out and touch you?

Don't trust what you see. Don't trust what you hear. Don't trust what you remember. It isn't what you think.

A new collection of twenty-one dark, unsettling and weird short stories that explore the spaces at the edge of possibility. Stories by: Ramsey Campbell, Simon Bestwick, Hannah Kate, Jeanette Greaves, Richard Freeman, Almira Holmes, Arpa Mukhopadhyay, Chris Galvin Nguyen, Christos Callow Jr., Daisy Black, Douglas Thompson, Jessica George, Keris McDonald, Laura Brown, Maree Kimberley, Margret Helgadottir, Nancy Schumann, Rachel Yelding, Steven K. Beattie, Tej Turner and Tracy Fahey.

Free event, with wine reception from 7pm. Readings from Douglas Thompson, Rachel Yelding, Tracy Fahey, Jeanette Greaves, Nancy Schumann, Jessica George and Hannah Kate. Launch party discount on book sales and competition/giveaways.

Sell Tickets Online through Eventbrite

Recent Publications by Members

A round-up of recent publications by members of the Manchester Medieval Society.

Gale R. Owen-Crocker

The Bayeux Tapestry: Collected Papers, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)

(with Elizabeth Coatsworth) ‘Textiles’, in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Medieval Studies, ed. Paul Szarmach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)

(as editor with Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Hayward), Encyclopedia of Dress and Textiles­ in the British Isles c. 450-1450 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012)

‘Hunger for England: ambition and appetite in the Bayeux Tapestry’, in Holy and Unholy Appetites in Anglo-Saxon England: a Collection of Studies in Honour of Hugh Magennis, ed. Marilina Cesario and Kathrin Prietzel, English Studies, 93:5 (2012): 540-549

‘Image Making: Portraits of Anglo-Saxon Church Leaders’, in Leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. Alexander R. Rumble, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), pp. 109-127

‘Anglo-Saxon Woman: Fame, Anonymity, Identity and Clothing’, in Dress and Identity in the Past, ed. Mary Harlow (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), pp. 85-96

Elizabeth Coatsworth

(with Gale R. Owen-Crocker), ‘Textiles’, in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Medieval Studies, ed. Paul Szarmach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)

(as editor with Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Maria Hayward), Encyclopedia of Dress and Textiles­ in the British Isles c. 450-1450 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012)

Alexander R. Rumble

(as editor) Leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012)

Hannah Priest

‘Review of The Jacqueline Rose Reader, ed. Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek (Durham, 2011)’, Feminism and Psychology, 22:4 (November 2012)

‘Unravelling Constance’, in Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, ed. Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012)

‘“Hell! Was I Becoming a Vampyre Slut?’: Sex, Sexuality and Morality in Young Adult Vampire Fiction’, in The Modern Vampire and Human Identity, ed. Deborah Mutch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)