Materialities of Disease Across the Medieval World

This interdisciplinary volume offers new ways to think about how disease and death, and healing and health, were considered, experienced, displayed, and portrayed across the global medieval world. Reaching across conventional disciplinary, historiographical, and geographical boundaries, Materialities of Disease investigates a broad selection of visual and material artefacts emerging from across the globe—from Western Europe, Western Africa, and Anatolia, to Japan, India, China, and New Spain. 

This volume focuses on non-textual narratives about disease that can be read in historical images, objects, human remains, archaeological remains, architectural spaces, materia medica, and other surviving artefacts. Taken together, these contributions, which are diverse and interdisciplinary, highlight and nuance some of the recent critical advances in scholarship being made in and for medical history across many fields

Lori Jones is an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, as well as an independent historian of medieval and early modern disease and medicine. She is the author of Patterns of Plague (2022) and editor of two volumes on pre-modern disease.