Assistant Professor
About
Role:
FacultyPosition:
- Assistant Professor
Concentration:
- Medieval History
- Mediterranean Europe
- Social History of Healing and Medicine
Department:
- History
Education:
- PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biography
I take an integrative approach to the history of healing in the later Middle Ages. I put learned medicine and the sufferer's experience in the context of larger political events and the social fabric of daily life.
My first book, Souls under Siege: Stories of Plague, War, and Confession in 14th-Century Provence explores a pious Mediterranean community adapting to the dangers of mercenary warfare and plague. In witness testimonies from the canonization inquest for Delphine de Puimichel, the sacrament of penance also emerges as a unique moment of potential healing and profound anxiety.
NB: Graduate students interested in working with me will need to be able to read Latin in order to work with primary sources.
Publications
Refereed Journal Articles:
• 2018, "Miracle Mediators as Healing Practitioners: Knowledge and Practice of Health and Healing with Relics," Social History of Medicine, v. 31, 209-230.
• 2015, "Miraculous Healing for the Warrior Soul: Transforming Fear, Violence, andShame in the Canonization Inquest for Delphine de Puimichel, 1363", Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, v. 41, 14-27
• 2013, "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves: Negotiating a Miracle in the Canonization of Countess Delphine de Puimichel," Anuario de Estudios Medievales v. 43, 1, 7-25. Available on-line at http://estudiosmedievales.revistas.csic.es/index.php/estudiosmedievales/article/view/433/441
• 2011, “Healing Options during the Plague: Survivor Stories from a Fourteenth-Century Canonization Inquest.” The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, v. 85, 531-559
• 2010, ““His Whole Heart Changed”: Political Uses of a Mercenary’s Emotional Transformation” in Les politiques des émotions du Moyen Âge, eds. Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, Micrologus v. 34, 169-190
Peer-Reviewed Chapters in Books:
•2019,“Medical and Scientific Understandings of Emotion,” in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age (350-1300), eds. Juanita Feros Ruys and Clare Monagle, London: Bloomsbury, 17-30
• 2018, "The "First Mortality" as a Time Marker in Fourteenth-Century Provence," in Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, eds. Katherine Randall and Tom Ewing, Blacksburg, Virginia: VT Publishing, 157-184.
• 2013, “Tempted to Kill: Miraculous Consolation for a Mother after the Death of Her Infant Daughter,” in Emotions and Health, 1200-1700, ed. Elena Carrera, Leiden: Brill, 47-66
• 2013, “Remembering Delphine’s Books: Reading as a Means to Shape a Holy Woman’s Sanctity” in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, eds. Amy Livingstone and Charlotte Newman Goldy, New York: Palgrave, 33-49
Courses
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HIST 201.005 Approaches to History, Humans and Nature in the Middle Ages
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HIST 309 Medieval Christianity