VivaMente: The Garden of Ideas

Applications for the 2025 VivaMente Grant are still open! This grant offers €5,000 in funding, along with complimentary use of the Domus Comeliana, to support exceptional proposals for up to a two-day event.

VivaMente promotes and sustains the best ideas in intellectual history and the history of ideas with adequate economic and logistic support. Applicants are not required to be CSMBR members. For more details and application guidelines, please visit the VivaMente Grant page or check the grant section below.

Popular Diseases and Thaumaturgic Specialisations

Reading Marian Legends as a Medical Source (18th century)

Marco Papasidero

Webinar: 16 January 2025 - 5 pm (CET) 

This lecture aims to examine how illness is represented in a collection of legends surrounding the foundation of Italian Marian sanctuaries, written in the early 18th century and drawing on earlier sources. It will also touch on magical and folkloric practices observed at these sanctuaries and their connections to concepts of illness and healing, enriching the discussion of the interplay between religion, medicine, and popular belief.

Rethinking Vesalius

Some New Answers to Old Questions

Vivian Nutton

Webinar: 30 January 2025 - 5 pm (CET) 

In 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. A key document in this is his almost entirely neglected Paraphrase of Rhazes Book 9, which in turn leads to a new consideration of the place and role of Basle and its printers in the Vesalius’ career from 1537 to 1555 and possibly even later.

You Look What You Eat

Renaissance Physiognomics of Food

Cecilia Muratori

Webinar: 11 February 2025 - 5 pm (CET) 

A discipline with authoritative roots in the (Pseudo)Aristotelian tradition, physiognomics demonstrates its full potential when a diagnosis becomes the foundation for an intervention directed at correcting faults and reinforcing strengths. This talk discusses this approach, by analysing Giovanni Battista Della Porta work Della fisonomia dell'huomo  (Naples 1598) and placing it in the broader context of Renaissance physiognomics. 

'Astrologus Praedicere Possit Futura Contingentia? Nego'

Astrology in Early Modern University Disputations

Michelle Aroney

Webinar: 25 February 2025 - 5 pm (CET) 

Regular oral disputations were a basic facet of university pedagogy, and the formal disputations required for graduation were typically public events. Valuable traces of oral culture, disputation records point to the role of education in intellectual and cultural change. This lecture will explore, in a series of case studies, how astrology figured in disputations in several early modern universities, ultimately disappearing from disputation literature over the course of the eighteenth century.

Distilling Bodies

Leonhard Thurneisser's Alchemy of Urine and the «Homo Alembicus»

Tillmann Taape

Webinar: 11 March 2025 - 5 pm (CET) 

How do you look inside your patients to see what ails them? For the alchemist Leonhard Thurneisser, the answer lay in distilling his patients’ urine. This 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. I also explore how distillation shaped Thurneisser’s understanding of human health in terms of matter and its transformations, and of the human body’s place in the material world.

Fertility, Maternity, and Reproduction

Women's Ideas in the History of Medicine

Jill Muller and Fabrizio Bigotti

Webinar Series

Organised in collaboration with the Centre for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists – University of Paderborn, this series seeks to understand the role of women in the history of medicine by exploring their contributions in fields such as natural philosophy, household remedies, plant manipulation and selection, as well as midwifery.

VivaMente Grant

Under this scheme € 5,000 plus the free usage of the Domus Comeliana will be awarded to the best proposals for a max. 2-day event to be held in Pisa. 

Comèl  Grant

The Comèl Grant offers financial support to young scholars (Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD candidates pre-defense) participating in CSMBR events, including both online and in-person opportunities.

Santorio Fellowship

Five Santorio Fellowships, worth €500 each, will be offered throughout as a gratuity to join the 2025 CSMBR Summer School. 

Join Now and Get Exclusive Access to Events and Grants

A CSMBR Membership allows you to partake in the scholarly debate with world-leading scholars, unlock travel grants, grants, and fellowships, organise exhibitions and conferences at the Domus Comeliana, and get discounts on our publications and events, both in Pisa and online. 

To make the most of it, check the new CSMBR Welcoming Guide, your essential companion to everything the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance is, does, and offers. 

From insights into our mission and events to exclusive member perks and practical tips for your stay in Pisa, this guide is designed to help you make the most of your CSMBR experience. Click below to download your copy and join us in fostering a vibrant community of scholarship and collaboration.

In late 16th-century Wittenberg, medical disputations explored supernatural mental states—lycanthropy, ecstasy, and witchcraft—linking them to demonic influence, disorders of phantasia, or both. In this talk, Manuel Huth traces the evolving discourse on "phantasia", illustrating its role in rationalising supernatural phenomena.

In this talk, Brooke Holmes analyses a moment from Galen’s 'On Problematic Movements' ("Peri tōn aporōn kinēseōn") where the discourse of contagious sympathy attracts Galen’s attention as he tries to make sense of bodily movements that trouble the boundary between what is voluntary and what is involuntary.

In this 'Santorio Lecture', Dr Tamar Nadav (Tel Aviv University), offers an insightful new glimpse into the twelfth-century notion of embodiment, its scientific foundations, and its medical motivations. 

In this 'Santorio Lecture', Dr Marsha Wubbels explores eighteenth-century physicians’ efforts to popularise measuring as a health practice, focussing especially on the practical challenges around body weighing, and how physicians navigated these practical challenges in their written health advice.

Tommaso Ghezzani

available for pre-order

20% off with membership

Matteo Pace

20% off with membership

Vivian Nutton

20% off with membership

Nicola Polloni and

Sylvain Roudaut

20% off with membership

What role did indigenous plants play in 17th-century medicine? De usu plantarum indigenarum in medicina (1690) by the Danish physician Ole Borch provides an in-depth look at how local flora was used to treat diseases.

Based on Aristotelian principles, Pomponazzi’s analysis of sense perception and the reliability of the senses in acquiring knowledge was pivotal to shaping Renaissance views on psychology and epistemology.

 © Arbor: Knowledge That Grows

CSMBR Newsletter

Cover image

The Solar Chariot, 1412-1416

Illumination by the Limbourg Brothers from

 'Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry'

MS 65, f. 5v, Cabinet des Livres

Bibliothèque du Musée Condé

Château de Chantilly, Oise.

Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR)
Domvs Comeliana, Via Pietro Maffi 48

56126  Pisa, Italy

info@csmbr.fondazionecomel.org

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