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*With apologies for cross-posting*
Kalamazoo 2016 CFP: Science, Nature and Scholarship in the Early Middle Ages / Medicine and Manuscripts, 900-1150
Paper proposals are invited for two sessions at Kalamazoo in May 2016 sponsored by Durham University: these focus on early and high medieval scientific/medical
writing, its intellectual and material contexts of production, and its connections with other disciplines and types of learning.
Please send abstract submissions (or any questions) to
Helen Foxhall Forbes ([log in to unmask]) by September 14th.
Kalamazoo 2016 CFP: Science, Nature and Scholarship in the Early Middle Ages
This session seeks to explore how science and nature were studied and discussed in early medieval scholarship with a view to exploring how medieval thinkers responded
to the natural world, and how they sought to understand and interpret natural phenomena. In particular, a key focus of this session will be evidence and how it was used, understood and interpreted by scholars in the early Middle Ages. It is often assumed that
early medieval scholars relied only on Scripture (and some inherited classical learning) for their interpretations of the natural world, but recent work has demonstrated both the importance of evidence drawn from observation in the early middle ages and the
range of different types of questions and methods that early medieval scholars used. This session aims to open up debate about science, nature and scholarship in the early middle ages: how did different kinds of knowledge about the natural world and evidence
for how it came into being relate to other kinds of information? what were the purposes (e.g. practical, theoretical, theological) to which scientific knowledge was put? how do surviving manuscripts provide information about the kinds of study that was being
undertaken in this period? Questions might also be raised about the relationships between the ideas expressed by those learned in contemporary scientific and natural philosophical traditions on the one hand, and on the other the perspectives of those who sought
other kinds of interpretations of the natural world. This session will offer an opportunity to reconsider the place of early medieval science – often thought (incorrectly!) to be almost non-existent – and its relationship to contemporary scholarship and to
the transmission of knowledge and ideas.
Kalamazoo 2016 CFP: Medicine and Manuscripts, 900-1150
This session will explore the material contexts of medical learning and practice, as well as the broader library contexts in which medical texts were transmitted
and created. Medical texts were often transmitted within large compilations devoted entirely to health and healing, but numerous short texts connected with healing were added into blank spaces in volumes which were not primarily devoted to medicine or healing.
This session seeks to address a number of questions about the relationship between medicine and its material transmission in the central and high Middle Ages: how can palaeographical and codicological study of manuscripts add to understanding the theory and
practice of medicine in the central and high Middle Ages? how far it is possible to distinguish between recipes, prayers, or charms in these texts, and did medieval writers signal these differences in any particular ways? were certain kinds of books or particular
types of spaces in books especially popular for adding material? how should we understand the relationship of surviving books to the transmission of medical knowledge and healing practices in the central and high Middle Ages? were certain types of texts –
such as ‘scientific’, astronomical or computistical texts – especially likely to be copied alongside texts intended for health and healing? and how did medical knowledge relate to other kinds of study in this period – was it considered to be part of ‘science’?
By investigating the physical contexts of medical knowledge – including the presence of medical books in surviving book lists, or descriptions of medical books being used in narrative texts – this session aims to shed light on the material form of the knowledge
employed for studying and effecting health and healing in the central and high Middle Ages.