The conference program for the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies provides vivid testimony to the vibrant work in both medieval medicine and digital history. I’ve taken a quite liberal definition of “medical” here, including talks that deal with imagery of the body (like flaying, for example). With far more sessions than time slots, it’s inevitable that several must overlap, though still no less disappointing. But hopefully there will be even more next year.
Medieval Medicine
Session 48: Medicine in Medieval Iberia
Public Health Initiatives of a Town in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon: Castello de la Plana | Douglas Kierdorf, Bentley Univ.
Medicine in Late Medieval Portugal: A Distinctive Spectrum of Healthcare? | Iona McCleery, Univ. of Leeds
Medical Cosmetics? An Ekphrastic Approach | Cristina Guardiola
Session 72: Wounds, Torture and the Grotesque
Holy Blood, Holey Body | Rachel Levinson-Emley, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
The Vision of Thurkill and the Performance of Purgatory | Michelle Kustarz, Wayne State Univ.
“Food for the Beasts”: Broken Human Bodies in Medieval Bestiary Illuminations | Susan Anderson, Arizona State Univ.
Session 121: Old English Literature
Locating the Alien Spirit: Poisonous Blood and Medieval Medicine in Beowulf | Barrett Beck, Florida State Univ.
Old English Remedies for Poison: Materials and Metaphor | Claire Whitenack, Cornell Univ.
Body Break-Ups and Make-Ups: Medicine as Metaphor in Soul and Body II and the Metrical Charms | Jenny Boyar, Univ. of Rochester
Session 122: Theory and Practice of Medieval Medicine
Political Profs.: The Medical Faculty of Late Medieval Bologna | Kira Robinson, Univ. of Alabama–Huntsville
The Evolution of Medicine in the Medieval University Curriculum | Michelle Fitzsimmons, Univ. of Missouri–Kansas City
Prophylactic and Therapeutic Plague Recipes in the Household Book of an Early Tudor Noble Family | Linda Ehrsam Voigts, Univ. of Missouri–Kansas City
Session 142: Reading Body Language: Digestion, Boundaries, and Community in the Middle Ages
Waste Management: Communal (In)Digestion in the Old French Fabliau Les trois dames de Paris | Stefanie Goyette, Harvard Univ.
Canterbury Bodies | Merrall Llewelyn Price, Western Kentucky Univ.
Constructing and Consuming Communities: An Examination of Medieval Bodily Consumption between Mothers and Children | Mary Zaborskis, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Menstruation and Purgation: Salvation of the Communal Self in Anglo-Saxon Female Religious Communities | Marybeth Matlack, Cornell Univ.
Session 144: Food and Violence in the Middle Ages II: Diets That Make (a) Difference: Food, Violence and the Religious “Other”
Not Fighting Fare: Debating Taste in Inquisitorial La Mancha | Madera Allan, Lawrence Univ.
“What, is Sarezyns flesch thus good?”: Cannibalism and the Humors in Richard Coer de Lyon | Sonja Mayrhofer, Univ. of Iowa
Violence and the Soul: The Penitential Diet in the Spanish Middle Ages | Martha M. Daas, Old Dominion Univ.
Session 147: Mental Health in Non-medical Terms
Mental Disability and Intellectual Impairment in the Middle Ages: Some Preliminary Research Findings | Irina Metzler, Swansea Univ.
Man Bites Dog: Alarming Effects of Medieval Animal Venom | Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Univ. of York
Going Mad in French: Royal Notaries and Charles V’s Translation Project | Aleksandra Pfau, Hendrix College
Civic and Religious Understanding of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled of Medieval England | Wendy J. Turner, Augusta State Univ.
Session 171: Technical Communication in the Middle Ages
Cookeries as Technical Literature in Late Medieval England and France | Sarah Peters Kernan, Ohio State Univ.
“A Comyn Rule in Cure”: Medieval Cookbooks as Technical Writing | Mary Frances Zambreno, Elmhurst College
Repurposing the (E)MEMT Corpus and Presenter Tool: Identifying Trends and Transitions in Page Design and Genre in Late Medieval through Early Modern Medical Texts | Susan Rauch, Texas Tech Univ.
Session 272: Fourteenth-Century Health Care
Pharmaceutical Traces: Textual Traditions of Drugs in the Late Middle Ages | Fred Gibbs, George Mason Univ.
Critiques of Medicine and Critiques of Astrology in the Fourteenth Century | James Byrne
Health Crises in the Mediterranean: State Prevention and Responses | Alexander F. More, Harvard Univ.
Session 340: Monsters II: Down to the skin: Images of Flaying in the Middle Ages
A Window for the Pain: Surface, Interiority, and Christ’s Flagellated Skin in Late Medieval Sculpture | Peter Dent, Univ. of Bristol
Getting under Your Skin: The Monstrous Subdermal | Derek Newman-Stille, Trent Univ.
The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew and the Rhetoric of the Flesh in the Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry | Sherry C. M. Lindquist, Western Illinois Univ.
“Lo, his flessh al be beflapped that fat is”: From Flagellation to Flaying in the English Cycle Passion Plays | Valerie Gramling, Univ. of Massachusetts–Amherst
Session 348: Multilingualism in the Middle Ages III
Code Switching in Medical Recipies | Susanna Niiranen, Jyväskylän Yliopisto
Session 475: Plants in the Middle Ages: Between Philosophy and Medicine
Roger Bacon and the Vegetative State | Jeremiah Hackett, Univ. of South Carolina–Columbia
The Old English Herbals and Faith-Based Healing Practice | Warren Tormey, Middle Tennessee State Univ.
Albert the Great’s On Plants and Late Medieval Natural Science | Iolanda Ventura, IRHT–Orléans
Session 509: Violence and Warfare in Late Medieval England
The Politics of Battlefield Medicine | Ilana Krug, York College of Pennsylvania
Session 510: When Women Fight: The Ideal, Reality, and Idealization of Female Aggression in the Middle Ages
Consorting with the Devil: Interpreting Aggressive Female Actors in Old English Medical Texts | Erin E. Sweany, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
Session 514: New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies II
Lay Access to Medical Resources in Anglo-Saxon England | Julia Bolotian, Univ. of Cambridge
Session 579: Low German Medieval Literature II: Medicine, Weltchronik, History, Osterspiel
The Manuscript Version of Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldbuch der Wundarzney in Copenhagen GKS 1663 Quart and Its Relation to the Printed Tradition | Chiara Benati, Univ. degli Studi di Genova
Digital History
Session 16: Taking It Public: Programming, Pedagogy, and Outreach (A Roundtable)
Session 32: Interdisciplinarity Now
Interdisciplinary Reading: Negotiating Sir Orfeo in a Digital Age
Session 50: Publish, Don’t Perish
Monographs in a Digital Age | Hans Christoffersen, Liturgical Press/St. John’s Univ.
Session 80: Emblem Studies
Emblems and the Digital Humanities | Sabine Moedersheim
Emblems and the Web 3.0 | Wim van Dongen, Vrije Univ. Amsterdam
Session 204: Collaborations: The Multi-lingual Classroom, Text Editing, and New Media (A Poster Session)
The Virtual Palimpsest: Teaching Students to Read Middle English | Andrea R. Harbin, SUNY–Cortland, and Tamara F. O’Callaghan, Northern Kentucky Univ.
How to Edit a Text in Collaboration with Everyone | Peter Robinson, Univ. of Saskatchewan
Session 238: E-publishing and Medieval Studies (A Roundtable Discussion)
Session 271: The Sciences and Medieval Studies: New Approaches, New Questions
Hypothesis Testing in the Humanities? A Digital Contribution to the Debate on Early “Germanic” Identity | Christopher M. Roberts, Arizona State Univ., and Sean M. Bergin, Arizona State Univ.
Session 272: Fourteenth-Century Health Care
Pharmaceutical Traces: Textual Traditions of Drugs in the Late Middle Ages | Fred Gibbs, George Mason Univ
Session 283: Critical Remediation: Intersections of Medieval Studies and Media Theory
The Digital Scribe: A Riddle | Yin Liu, Univ. of Saskatchewan
Mapping Social Networks: An Ordinary Habit: Remediation of Dutch “Alba Amicorum” in Today’s Social Network Mapping Services | Sophie Reinders, Radboud Univ. Nijmegen
Rethinking Anglo-Saxon Epistolarity | Jordan Zweck, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison
Session 382: Blogging the Medieval(ist) World (A Roundtable)
Session 500: New Developments in Digital Resources on Medieval Austria, Germany, and Switzerland
Digital Resources on Things in a Domesticated Space | Ingrid Matschinegg, Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
The vHMML Project: At the Crossroads of Digital Humanities and Manuscript Studies | Matthew Z. Heintzelman
Session 547: Digitizing Saintly Space: Barking Abbey
Barking Abbey: A GIS Map of a Medieval Nunnery | Donna Alfano Bussell
Tracing Sacred Pathways: Processions at Barking Abbey | Kay Slocum, Capital Univ.
Session 549: Doing Things with Manuscripts
Emerging Technologies and Medieval Literary Networks: Finding Machaut’s Readers | Deborah McGrady, Univ. of Virginia, and Rachel Geer, Univ. of Virginia
Session 578: The Scribes of Medieval English Manuscripts: New Knowledge, New Technologies
Textual Problems and Progress: Some Incidental Findings of the Dictionary of Old English, Digital Mappaemundi, and the Parker on the Web Project | Alex Fleck, Centre for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Toronto/Dictionary of Old English, Univ. of Toronto
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