Associate Professor

About

  • Role:

    Faculty

  • Position:

    • Associate 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

Books:
• 2021,Souls under Siege: Stories of Plague, War, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence, Cornell University Press.

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

  • HIST 201.005 Approaches to History, Humans and Nature in the Middle Ages

  • HIST 309 Medieval Christianity