About the Site

An evolving digital hub for the study of medieval medicine.

Plagues and Peoples originated as “one stop shop” for the students of my upper level history course, HIST 3214, “Plagues and Peoples: Health and Disease in Medieval Europe.” The course itself focused on the ever-evolving relationship between humanity and the world around us, particularly the ways in which microscopic organisms have fundamentally changed the human experience. I asked students to interrogate several concepts, including “health,” “illness,” and “medicine,” as we studied not only major outbreaks such as the Plague of Justinian and the Columbian Exchange, but the role of astrology in medieval health management and the shifting ways by which medieval people enforced disciplinary boundaries, deciding who, exactly, counted as a medical practioner. Students were required to research a topic relavent to medieval medical history and craft blog posts, available here. The results were enlightening and at times funny, but by the end of the semester, the exams were given, the blogs finished, and Plagues and Peoples was no longer seemed to be an evolving digital space.

The current pandemic, however, changed this. Not only did it provide me with more unstructured time as classes moved online, but it also collapsed many temporal boundaries. So many of the things we see in the nightly news in the age of COVID19 – the spreading of misinformation, the creation of emergency burial grounds, rising xenophobia – are not new ways of responding to outbreaks of disease but rather direct corrolaries to the social responses of our medieval forebears. It impressed upon me even more intensely the continued importance of the work historians do.

The new Plagues and Peoples, therefore, is intended to act as a resource for students, teachers, and laypeople interested in the various ways humanity, disease, and history act upon, and respond to, each other.

Rachel Podd, April 2020

On the site, you will find the following resources:

1. A Handlist of Resources for Students and Teachers (Under Construction)
2. Images of Impairment – an ongoing project to collect medieval illuminations depicting illness and medical treatment. (Under Construction)
3. HIST 3124 Syllabus – the original syllabus for the Plagues and Peoples Class, which will hopefully prove useful to other educators
4. HIST 3124 Student Blog – the original blogposts written by Fordham students as part of their coursework, including citations and suggestions for further reading.

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