IMC 2026: Sessions

This session represents the second of four proposed sessions that focus on the various temporalities of health, healing and disease in medieval medicine. This session offers three papers that each examine the gendered and temporal dimensions of medieval obstetric & gynecological care. The first paper, 'Gendered Healing and Knowledge Transmission: The Role of Midwives in Medieval Malabar', examines the practice of medieval midwives in the Malabar region of South Asia, situating them as self-trained practitioners whose practices challenged patriarchal medical authority and constituted an example female agency and indigenous knowledge that cared for women throughout their life cycle. The second paper, 'Beyond Pickles and Ice Cream: Connections between Food and Medieval Pregnancy and Childbirth', analyses sources such as Soranus of Ephesus's On Midwifery and Diseases of Pregnancy, Michele Savanarola's De Regime Pregnantium, and Nicholas Culpeper's The Complete Herbal, to contextualize changing cultural and medical ideas about pregnancy, health, and nutrition over time. The third paper, 'Crystallus et Corallus: Lapidary Medicine and the Medieval Female Lifecycle', examines the recommendations of such authors as Dioscorides, Constantinus Africanus, and Albertus Magnus on the healing use of lapidary objects for women throughout the various stages of their life.