International Workshop; Organisers: Ursula Gießmann and Eva-Maria Cersovsky (University of Cologne), a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, in cooperation with the Centre for Medieval Studies Cologne (ZEMAK)

Venue: University of Cologne
Time: 25th-26th January 2018
Proposals by: 31st May 2017

Gender played a constitutive role in interpreting and ordering the medieval world, organising social and power relations as well as shaping how medieval people thought about and experienced their surroundings. Medievalists interested in disease, health and medicine have incorporated gender into their historical analyses for some decades. Research on women’s healthcare has been especially innovative, not only reassessing the extent of male involvement in women’s health, but at the same time reappraising women’s health literacy, healing and caring practices, thereby redefining what constituted medieval medical work on the whole. With interpretative frameworks proposing a more body-centred view of medieval health and healing, scholars have also challenged Lacqueur’s notion of a “one-sex body” and focused more closely on the gendering of bodies in medical and gynaecological texts or the dead female body in anatomical dissection. Read more and source … (Web)