[Gandur] Strengleikar á fimmtudaginn / Medieval seminar this Thursday

[Gerður Halldóra Sigurðardóttir]

Strengleikar verða á fimmtudaginn kl. 16.15 í st. 422 í Árnagarði.

 

 

Strengleikar - Medieval seminar

 

Thursday, September 27, 2012

16.15

Room 422, Árnagarður

(followed by drinks)

 

 

Maribeth Polhill, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus

 

“Bear’s blood, mare’s milk, a pinch of snail’s shell:

Materia medica animalis and cultural contexts” 

 

This talk will discuss cultural (gendered and class-based) consequences of
medieval pharmacological discourse, especially focusing on Hans Minner’s
Tierbuch, a late medieval/early modern pharmaceutical bestiary.

 

Hans Minner administered a pharmacy in fifteenth-century Zürich and composed
a wide variety of pharmaceutical and medicinal texts, including surgical
guides, a urological treatise, an herbal, the Tierbuch, and extensive
glossaries. Minner’s texts represent a moment in which medical knowledge
previously belonging to the aristocracy is shared with a wider audience in
the late medieval period of continental Europe. By considering evidence in
the Tierbuch, this talk investigates this redistribution of knowledge,
discussing the text’s participation in and location at the intersection of
medical, professional, gendered, and sociocultural discourses.

 

My study links the redistribution of knowledge both to the development of
pharmaceutical practice as a profession and to the increasing exclusion of
women from the medical fields, both as holders of knowledge and as
practitioners. This talk will discuss how the Tierbuch rearranges and
modifies information to suit the needs of, on the one hand, a pharmacist,
and on the other hand, less economically privileged social classes. Then I
will consider how recipes dealing with sexual issues are gendered, with
certain recipes reflecting a concern with controlling women’s sexuality.

 

Various methodologies employed to investigate medical discourse will be
considered and evaluated: Fachprosaforschung, historiography, cultural
studies, and psychoanalysis.

 

 

Maribeth Polhill is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus,
in San Juan. She began university studies as a scientist, obtaining a B.S.
in zoology, before switching to the humanities, and acquiring her Ph.D. in
medieval German literature at Cornell University. At the University of
Puerto Rico, she teaches a variety of panoramic courses in medieval and
early modern literature, as well as graduate courses in medieval Germanic
literatures. Her research focuses on medieval European – especially German –
literature, the history of science, and the intersections among literature,
science and culture.  She is the author of Hans Minners >Tierbuch< (ca.
1478): Edition – Kommentar – Wörterbuch (published in 2006). Her current
research investigates lovesickness as a late medieval and early modern
medical discourse, and its representations in Spanish, French, and German
courtly literature. She has also planned a few projects involving medieval
Icelandic literature, and hopes to improve her Icelandic.