Sarah Toulalan and Katherine Rider award the VivaMente Grant to explore reproduction and fertility across the pre-modern period.
We’re very excited to have been awarded this year’s VivaMente Grant to hold a conference on Fertility, Medicine and the Body: Theory and Practice across the Premodern World. Both of us work on the history of fertility and reproduction (Catherine on the Middle Ages and Sarah on early modern England) and for some time we’ve been talking about the amount of interesting work that is being done in the field. This work spans a wide range of periods and regions, including ancient Greece, the medieval Arabic-speaking world, and medieval and early modern Europe. We began to think that the next step was to bring specialists in these different cultures together, to explore long-term continuity and change, especially since all of these cultures had medical ideas about reproduction that were rooted in ancient Greek humoral medicine. We also wondered how ideas about fertility in these cultures compared with those of other premodern societies, for example in China and India. The VivaMente Grant has given us the opportunity to start exploring the history of fertility comparatively. It has allowed us to invite speakers who work on different periods and places, including one who will talk about how the history of premodern fertility speaks to contemporary issues. The CSMBR’s reputation is also helping us to attract other scholars from many different countries and career stages to be part of this work – including many we haven’t met yet!