VivaMente Grantees
VivaMente Grantees
2023
Catherine Rider and Sarah Toulalan
University of Exeter
Fertility, Medicine and the Body
Theory and Practice across the Premodern World
Catherine Rider is an Associate Professor in Medieval History at the University of Exeter. She is interested in the religious and cultural history of Europe in the late Middle Ages. Her research to date has focused predominantly on the history of magic and the church’s attitude to magic, with volumes such as Magic and Religion in Medieval England (2012) and the co-edited volume, with Sophie Page, Routledge History of Medieval Magic (2019). Sarah Toulalan is also an Associate Professor at Exeter and her research area covers topics such as the history of the body, with particular interests in gender, sex, sexuality, ageing, and body size. She is currently finishing writing a book on ‘Children and sex in early modern England: knowledge, consent, abuse c.1550-1750’ generously funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.
2024
Daniel King and Nephele Papakonstantinou
University of Exeter – University of Würzburg
‘Narratio’ in Medicine and the Law
Interpretative and Scientific Knowledge in Medico-Legal Case History, from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
Nephele Papakonstantinou is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institut für Klassische Philologie at the University of Würzburg with a project on normative constructions of iniuria under the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. She has taught a wide range of subjects of Latin literature, mainly at the University of Athens. An expert in imperial Greek culture and literature from the late 1st century AD to the mid-fourth, Daniel King is Associate Professor and Leventis Associate Professor in the Impact of Greek Culture at the University of Exeter. His research spans the history of the body, gender construction, emotions, medicine, and science. Notably, he has explored the construction of distress in imperial culture and the experience of pain in Greek culture.
2020
Fabrizio Baldassarri
University of Bucharest
Medicine in the Philosophy of Descartes
Lights and Shadows
Fabrizio Baldassarri defended a PhD thesis in Descartes’ naturalistic studies in 2013, especially focusing on a Cartesian natural history embedded within his natural philosophy. He has recently been aiming attention at Descartes’ botanical studies as they emerged in Descartes’ correspondence and in his under-studied manuscripts. Additionally, Baldassarri’s thread of research are directed towards (1.) the comprehension of the relationship method-experimentation in Descartes; (2.) the understanding of Descartes’ theory of matter; (3.) the redefinition of Descartes’ sciences of life and of a few aspects of his medicine, physiology and therapeutics. Baldassarri has published on all these subjects, and he is now looking at the relationships Descartes’ had with his scientific studies.
2022
