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A one-day workshop at King’s College,
For programme and registration details please go to
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/medievaleurope.html
Conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of healthy children (or animals) were high-risk endeavours
in the Middle Ages, the focus of many hopes and anxieties. These emotions found expression in prayers and charms, in private letters, in hagiography and miracle accounts, in records of ecclesiastical and secular courts, as well as in advice literature and
medical writings. Themes to do with generation and reproduction were also at the centre of imaginative writings, notably romance and fable, and of medieval art. The range of evidence available for historical investigation is thus very wide, though the private
experiences of those involved are as always hard to plumb.
This meeting will explore the beliefs and practices that surrounded generation
and reproduction and the frames of understanding that underlay these. One focus of interest is the tension between normative discourse, texts that tell people how they should believe and act, and other discourses that are resistant to or circumvent the injunctions
of law, dogma and discipline. Another is the extent to which the development of scholastic methods of analysis in the medieval universities, as applied to philosophical issues in generation and reproduction, produced new interpretations of gender roles in
conception, of ensoulment in the developing child, and of the responsibilities of church and state in promoting robust children and population numbers.
A third area of interest is the extent to which generation and reproduction came to be thought of as health issues at all in the Middle Ages. How far did concepts of disease and disability seem to apply to mothers, fathers and children?
NB: on 7 December 2012 there will be a public lecture by Dr Marianne Elsakkers at the Department of
History and Philosophy of Science,