Medieval Studies Program | Seeking a Distant Cure: Health Care & Travel in the Medieval Western Mediterranean

“Seeking a Distant Cure: Health Care and Travel in the Medieval Western Mediterranean,” Professor Nicole Archambeau (History, Colorado State)

Date: Friday, January 27

Time: 5:00 pm

Place: Zoom, link here.

In the fourteenth century people of all social levels traveled significant distances for health care. Narrative sources reveal the ill searched for a better doctor at a time when university-trained medical practitioners were an exciting new alternative. Sufferers sought out distant saints when local options did not work. And numerous people traveled to specialists, saintly and secular, for specific health problems. In contrast to modern assumptions that people in medieval Europe rarely traveled, evidence shows that the sick were willing to travel very far from home in search of a remedy.

Nicole Archambeau, an associate professor of History at Colorado State University, explores medieval understandings of sickness, remedy, and health. She has published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and the Journal of Social History Her book, Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in 14th Century Provence, uncovers the sufferers’ point of view of catastrophe through canonization inquest narratives. In her new research project, she studies health care in the garden for animals, plants, and humans.

This lecture is sponsored by the Anonymous Fund with the support of the Department of History.