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.

My new research project, Galen in the Garden, looks at agricultural spaces as locations of health care for humans, animals, and plants. It also considers agricultural products, especially beeswax, in spiritual as well as physical health care.

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, and Shame 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:

•2024, "Humans Serving Nature: Beekeeping and Bee Products in Piero de Crescenzi's Ruralia commoda," in Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times: Exploration of a Critical Relationship, ed. Albrecht Classen, Berlin: de Gruyter, 169-188.

•2022, "Epidemic Illness in the Last Book of Giovanni Villani's New Chronicle, 1345-1348: Warfare, Sin, and the Heavens," in Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives from across the Mediterranean and Beyond, eds. Lori Jones and Nukhet Varlik, York: York Medieval Press, 99-122

•2021, "Protection Miracles as Evidence for the Shifting Political Landscape of Fourteenth-Century Provence," in A Companion to Medieval Miracle Collections, eds. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Jenni Kuuliala and Iona McCleery, Leiden: Brill, 274-298

•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

On-line Publications

•2022, "Penance and Plague: How the Black Death changed one of Christianity's most important rituals," The Conversation, April 11

•2020, "Surviving an Invasion during a Pandemic in the 14th Century," College of Liberal Arts Magazine, Winter Edition

Courses

  • HIST 392 Historical Methods

  • HIST 309 Medieval Christianity

  • HIST 313 Law and Justice in the Middle Ages