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Weekend Seminar
on
Medieval Science and Medicine

2002

The Plagues of the Middle Ages
February 1 - 2, 2002
Anthropology Building, Room 163


The Black Death is one of the topics from the Middle Ages which has held a fascination for the general public. In the space of about a year, 1348-49, one-third to one-half of the entire population of Europe was wiped out. The scale of the plague's impact and its precise character remain points of debate and research. Scholars have attributed the plague to a serious impact on medieval art, literature, and scientific inquiry, as well as even more fundamental changes in ideas about life, death, and man's relationship to God. The economic dislocation alone played a significant role in undermining the ordered society of the medieval world. The topic of the plagues in the Middle Ages, therefore, engages a wide array of important topics in the humanities.



Lecture Schedule


Friday, February 1, 2002

07:00 - 07:30      Definitions and Parameters: The Biology of the Plague
                           William Reed, School of Medicine of the University of New Mexico

07:30 - 08:30      Before the Black Death: Famine and Resistance in Medieval Europe
                           Keynote Address: William C. Jordan, Department of History at Princeton
                           University
                           
Saturday, February 2, 2002

09:00 - 10:00      Iconographic Images of the Plague
                           David A. Bennahum, School of Medicine of the
                           University of New Mexico
                           Slide lecture

10:15 - 11:15      God and the Animals: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
                           William C. Jordan, Department of History at Princeton University
                           (with a brief musical demonstration)

11:30 - 12:30      Living with the Plague : Medical, Governmental, and Popular Responses
                           to the Black Plague in Italy

                           Shona Kelly Wray, Department of HistoryUniversity of Missouri-Kansas City

12:30 - 02:00      Break

02:00 - 03:00      Plague and the Medical Doctor: Helpless and Hopeless?
                           Peter Murray Jones, King's College, Cambridge University, UK

03:15 - 04:30      The Plague and Other Plagues in Contemporary New Mexico: Causes,
                           Transmission, Treatments

                           Panel discussion led by Gregory J. Mertz and Brian Hjelle, School of Medicine
                           at the University of New Mexico


 

Institute for Medieval Studies
University of New Mexico
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