CfP: Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective

We are seeking submissions for an interdisciplinary collection of essays tentatively titled 
Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective

This edited volume seeks to put into conversation a range of historical, literary, and cultural texts and objects related to the theory, practice, and experience of health and healing from an Iberian-Global and gendered perspective, between 1500-1700. We invite papers that broadly interrogate the concepts of “health” and “healing” from all geographical areas within early modern Iberia and its global kingdoms. We encourage innovative responses to the topics that include but are not limited to: interactions between healer and patient; health status, belief and spiritual (religious and magical) practices; creation and circulation of drugs, herbal remedies, and the status and representation of herbalists and apothecaries; the professionalization of medicine and gendered divisions of labor and care; recipe books, diet practices and access to food. We are also interested in the ways early modern health discourse intersected with the sensory world: how were health care decisions shaped by sight, smell, touch, sound, taste as well as feeling, believing, remembering and knowing?

We anticipate publishing this volume in paperback with a university press, with the potential for classroom adoption. Essays from practitioners of all disciplines are welcome. This volume aims to reach across the fields of Iberian and global early modern studies, history of science and medicine, and gender, sexuality and women’s studies.

Please send a 250 to 300-word proposal and CV to Margaret E. Boyle (mboyle2@bowdoin.edu) and Sarah E. Owens (owenss@cofc.edu) by January 15, 2018.  Authors will be notified no later than January 30, 2018. If the proposal is accepted by the press, completed essays would be expected approximately 6 months after acceptance date.

Contact Info: 
Sarah E. Owens. Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C. She specializes in the writings of colonial and early modern Spanish nuns. Her research has taken her to the archives of Mexico, Spain, Chile, Peru, and the Vatican. In 2009 she published an award-winning edition of a Spanish nun’s travel account called Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns. Her co-edited second book with Jane Mangan, Women of the Iberian Atlantic (LSU Press, 2012), won the award for best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Her latest book, Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire (University of New Mexico Press, 2017), was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a sabbatical from the College of Charleston.
Margaret E. Boyle. Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Margaret's teaching and research spans the literature and culture of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, as well as feminist, gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence and Punishment in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2014). Her primary interests include early modern women's literary and cultural history, comedia history and performance, and practices of early modern health and healing.