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Future Events / Online LecturesWhy did Galenic pharmacopoeia survive for nearly two millennia? This lecture explores the intellectual, cultural, and practical reasons behind its extraordinary resilience.21/07/2026
Future Events / Online LecturesLong regarded as an exceptional voice in early modern thought, Oliva Sabuco is revisited by Jil Müller, who reconstructs her original reinterpretation of women’s role in generation and nurture.14/10/2026
Future Events / Online LecturesIn this lecture, Dr Anna Gili examines the treatment of leprosy in the Kitāb al-Malakī, offering new insights into medieval medicine and the transmission of knowledge across the Mediterranean.22/09/2026
Conferences and Webinars / Future Events / VivaMente ConferencesThis VivaMente conference explores deafness and the deaf person in the premodern period through historical, medical, and socio-cultural perspectives.17/11/2026
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Online Lectures / Past EventsThe lecture will focus on a group of selected illustrative recipes for body cleansers and powdered deodorants from Book VIII of Aetius of Amida’s medical encyclopaedia entitled “Libri medicinales”, composed in the 6th century.07/07/2026
Conferences and Webinars / Past EventsFew texts in history have enjoyed the centrality of Aristotle’s De Anima. The work presupposes and at the same time coordinates the entire structure of Aristotle’s inquiry on the living world and remained vital long after other parts of Aristotle’s natural philosophy ceased to command obedience in the academic world. [...]02/07/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis talk examines how dream colours were linked to the humours in medieval Arabic and Latin texts, tracing their transmission from Galenic medicine and how later authors preserved or modified this idea.25/06/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsIn this lecture, Daniella Zaidman-Mauer examines how Yiddish texts articulated integrated medical and religious responses to epidemic disease in early modern Jewish communities.11/06/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsA fourteenth-century Persian text on Chinese medicine describes blood “making rounds” through the body; what this implies for the history of physiology will be examined in this lecture.28/05/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis lecture examines how Renaissance gynaecological authors used Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” as a source for medical knowledge, cases, and accounts of extraordinary phenomena.12/05/2026
Online Lectures / Past EventsThis 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
Online Lectures / Past EventsWhy 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
Online Lectures / Past EventsIn 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
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