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Future Events / Online LecturesIn this lecture, Henrique Leitão shows how sixteenth-century ‘Problemata literature’ remained a flexible explanatory genre that allowed causal investigation without fully satisfying strict Aristotelian epistemic requirements.24/02/2026
Future Events / Online LecturesWhy do medicines work? This lecture revisits fourteenth-century Italy, where physicians such as Taddeo Alderotti and Dino del Garbo sought to answer this question by combining Galenic medicine with philosophical theories of form, matter, and hidden powers.14/04/2026
Future Events / Online LecturesThis lecture reassesses Michael Servetus’s account of pulmonary blood transit within its sixteenth-century theological and medical context, arguing that later claims crediting him with discovering circulation misread a theory originally intended to explain how the soul enters the body.24/02/2026
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    Recently Past Events
Online Lectures / Past EventsSharhzad Irannejed examines medieval Islamicate diagrams of the brain and its ventricles as variable scribal artefacts, arguing that their visual differences can be analysed with philological and codicological methods to reconstruct manuscript relationships and to understand the dynamics of anatomical representation beyond anatomical accuracy.19/02/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsFocusing on Philoponus’s commentary on Aristotle’s “Physics”, this lecture will examine the recovery of the Greek text and its later diffusion through Latin translation from the lands of Byzantium to Florence, Venice, and beyond.10/03/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsWhat are occult qualities, and why did they become a central problem in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine? This lecture examines early modern debates from Jean Fernel to Daniel Sennert, showing how attempts to explain hidden causal powers shaped scientific and medical thought on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.10/02/2026
Online Lectures / Past Eventsin this talk, Brooke Holmes presents the history of the ancient concept of “sympatheia”, from the emergence of the language of sympathy in fourth-century BCE Greek texts to the theory of cosmic sympathy developed by Plotinus in the third century CE.28/01/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsIn this lecture, Monica Green explores how pathogen palaeogenetics, through ancient microbial genomes, is transforming our understanding of the evolution and global circulation of premodern infectious diseases.13/01/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsThe talk explores how George Eberhard Rumphius’s natural history and medicinal botany in the Dutch colonial archipelago were shaped by his engagement with Imam Ridjali’s Islamic scholarship and the shared reformist intellectual currents of seventeenth-century Indonesia.16/12/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThe lecture examines how Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro redefined early modern diagnosis by theorising the transformation and propagation of diseases through new conceptual tools such as metaptosis, epigenesis, and metastasis.04/12/2025
Online Lectures / Past Events / Past LecturesThis talk focuses on Rupescissa’s pharmacological work, “De famulatu philosophie” (1351-1352) and repositions his thought in the context of his Franciscan profession.25/11/2025
Conferences and Webinars / Past EventsThis conference traces how technical knowledge has been transmitted across human history through texts, images, and hands-on re-creation, with special attention to ancient anatomy and the possibilities offered by digital tools.24/11/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis lecture explores al-Majūsī’s “Kitāb al-Malakī” and its Latin translation, showing how Book X on compound medicaments was reshaped into a new synthesis of pharmacology and philosophy.11/11/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk investigates early modern astro-medicine through the manuscripts of the Vitali Archive in Parma. It focuses on Buonafede Vitali Senior (1686–1745) and his son, who integrated astrology into diagnosis, treatment, and teaching, at a time when astrology was being marginalised by the scholarly elite.24/10/2025
Conferences and Webinars / Past EventsThis conference explores the creation and dissemination of medical knowledge in late medieval and early modern Europe within established and informal networks.22/10/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsWhat did physicians in the Renaissance think about sexual pleasure? And how did they approach the female body? This paper discussess Renaissance interpretations on Hippocrates’ “On Generation”.30/09/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis lecture explores how Ibn al-Nafis reshaped medical theory by innovating on Greek and Arabic authors, influencing empirical practice and philosophical thought in Islamic societies (1200–1500)07/10/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk provides an overview of Linnaeus’s works on ecology, reproductive biology, and anthropology, which demonstrate how his thinking was much more relational and dynamic than we usually take for granted.16/09/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsIn the late medieval world, managing health was as integral to merchant identity as navigating markets or maintaining ledgers.22/07/2025
Conferences and Webinars / Past Events / VivaMente ConferencesThis VivaMente Conference examines the interplay between medicine and society in the Late Middle Ages, assessing how medical theories, practices, and language both shaped and were shaped by philosophical, theological, and political thought.16/07/2025
Past Events / Summer SchoolsThis summer school will offer an overview of the current state of the art in the fields of early modern anatomy and surgery, of the major historiographical debates, and of promising perspectives and sources for future research.08/07/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsIs nobility an innate virtue or not? In their respective reflections on nobility and individual differences, Dante and Cecco d’Ascoli invoke the example of twins, arguing that one twin may be ‘noble’ while the other is not.24/06/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk will discuss the issues surrounding the identification of medical practitioners and how registers could be used to analyse changes in medical practice.10/06/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk explores metabolism as a concept in the history of biology, using it as starting point for the exploration of a wider metaphorical level: the regulation of the relationship, material as much as conceptual, between self and non-self, and between human and environment (consumption and dietetics, processing, travel, trade, [...]27/05/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsIs it possible to discern what is concealed within the human soul through what is outwardly manifest? This lecture will explore attempts to contextualise the reasoning characteristic of physiognomic practices as sign-based inference within the medieval Arabic tradition.06/05/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk delves into the pharmacopoeia of ancient Egypt as preserved and practiced by the Copts, who have inherited and adapted a rich medical tradition that dates back to the time of the pharaohs.22/04/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk will present the results of research in progress into the role of the Venice’s Health Office in monitoring and managing the city’s freshwater supply during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.08/04/2025
Past EventsInvestigating extractive processes in the making of medicines, this talk provides an analysis of animal treatment and killing techniques recommended in a series of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian manuscripts recipes predominantly authored by elite domestic practitioners.25/03/2025
Conferences and Webinars / Past EventsThis series explores women’s contributions to various medically relevant fields and practices such as natural philosophy, household remedies, plant manipulation and selection, as well as midwifery.
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk shows how Thurneisser’s analogy between bodily and technical processes offered a new and lucrative diagnostic technique that changed the agencies of patients and practitioners.11/03/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsBy looking at a variety of case studies, this lecture will explore how astrology figured in disputations in several early modern universities, ultimately disappearing from disputation literature over the course of the eighteenth century.25/02/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsBy highlighting the body’s role as a channel for affecting the soul, this lecture situates Della Porta’s dietary recommendations within the broader framework of Renaissance physiognomics11/02/2025
Online Lectures / Past EventsIn this talk, Vivian Nutton explores some of the consequences of these discoveries for our understanding of Vesalius and his “Fabrica” from his time in Paris in the in the 1530s right through until the last years of his career as royal physician.30/01/2025