Naama Cohen-Hanegbi
Senior Lecturer
Historian of the later middle ages Europe, Health, Medicine, and Culture
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About
I study the later Middle Ages, with an emphasis on culture, the body, health, knowledge, faith, and religious belonging. My first book dealt with the treatment of the soul and the emotions in medical theory and practice in the western Mediterranean. I was especially interested in the reciprocity between medical thought and pastoral theology as the two disciplines formulated an understanding of the soul, as well as in how these shaped social norms with regards to emotions. In an ongoing research project, I study late 14th-century Castile’s growing intellectual culture. I read medical, theological, philosophical, and legal texts produced in the area, wishing to compile a biography of local knowledge and to identify its part in the formation of a Christian society in the region.
Current Research
Currently, I am writing a monograph on childbirth, purification, and mental distress in the later Middle Ages.
Courses
I teach courses on diverse aspects of medieval culture, social and intellectual history; health, sickness, body, medicine, and plagues are frequently included.
Graduate Students
I supervise MA and Ph.D. students working on the later Middle Ages, medieval medicine, and health (including Hebrew medicine).
Publications
“Feeling Unhealthy in Late Medieval Europe.” In The Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Iona McCleery (London: Berg, 2021), pp. 131-153.
“Afterword: Healing Women and Women Healers”. In Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550, eds. Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 315-323.
“Postpartum Mental Distress in Late Medieval Europe.” The Mediaeval Journal 9.1 (2019): 109-141.
Cluster editor: Learning Practice from Texts: Jews and Medicine in the Later Middle Ages, special cluster, Social History of Medicine 32.4 (2019): 659-750.
Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2017)
“A Moving Soul: Emotions in Late Medieval Medicine.” Osiris 31 (2016): 1-21.
“Jean of Avignon: Conversing in Two Worlds.” Medieval Encounters 22 (2016): 165-192.
“Mourning under Medical Care: A Study of a Consilium by Bartolomeo Montagnana.” Parergon 31.2 (2014): 35-54.