Whole, Holy, Healthy: Sickness and the Body in the Medieval North Atlantic

What does it mean, culturally speaking, to get sick? What makes a body healthy? This talk explores depictions of disease in medical remedies and healing charms from the medieval North Atlantic, a multilingual zone of intensive cultural interaction and exchange. These vivid texts allow us to better understand how medieval people thought about their own bodies and about the place of humanity in a hostile world – deconstructing cultural anxieties and fantasies around the idea of an individuated, embodied self.

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The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Erica Weaver, assistant professor in UCLA’s English Department.

This event is co-sponsored by UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies.

Caroline (Caz) Batten is Assistant Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, they have published widely on gender and sexuality, sickness and health, the history of medicine, and somatic emotion in medieval texts. Their short book Health and the Body in Early Medieval England is forthcoming as a Cambridge Element in 2024.