Age and Health 1500-1800 Conference

Categories:

Jennifer McFarland and Olivia Formby, University of Cambridge

  • jmm269@cam.ac.uk
  • occf2@cam.ac.uk

 

Held at St John’s College, University of Cambridge on 24 June 2024, Age and Health 1500-1800 brought together nine postgraduate and early career speakers working on various aspects of health and the life cycle, with a further thirty attendees in person and online.

In the morning, Leah Astbury (Bristol) delivered a stimulating keynote paper on ‘Health, Medicine and Childbearing Years in Early Modern England’ which set the tone for the day. Her paper explored the interplay between the social expectations of pregnancy and childbearing, and the everyday medical experiences of managing the childbearing body. Astbury’s keynote highlighted how men and women monitored their sexual and reproductive health during this ‘narrow’ life cycle stage. The way that looking at age and health together draws out themes of gender, marriage, generation, and bodily knowledge and authority would weave throughout the papers that followed.

Those papers were divided into panels focused on ‘Sensing and Caring’, ‘Categories of Age and Health’, and ‘Ageing Women’, exploring themes such as disability, domestic medicine and care, legal contexts for age thresholds, and gender. The eight papers demonstrated the exciting range of sources available for understanding health and wellbeing in the early modern world. While some speakers focused on visual and textual medical material such as treatises, recipe books and handbills (Lucy Havard, Anita Hoffmann), others drew on literature (Sara Zadrozny) and several on material often associated with charitable practices, such as petitions, or court and judicial records (Théo Rivière, Carys Brown, Sarah K. Hitchen, Anna Graham) as well as private correspondence,  to offer fresh analyses of early modern understandings of bodily and mental health, especially within domestic space. Our discussion session based on a section of Jennifer Evans’ recent Men’s Sexual Health in Early Modern England (AUP, 2023) gave us the opportunity to discuss the relationship between health and masculinity, as well as why middle age as a health stage for men has been less well-studied than for women.

It was wonderful to be able to bring early career and postgraduate researchers working on different stages of the life cycle together. The intimate nature of a small, one-day conference allowed the speakers to test out work-in-progress with an expert and friendly peer audience, with productive and exciting discussion. Two speakers have contributed a short reflection.

 

As a researcher of nineteenth-century medicine and literature, Age and Health, 1500-1800 provided me with a wonderful opportunity to learn about early modern approaches to health and the life cycle. I discovered similarities in the attitudes towards the applied labels of childhood, sickness and old age pre-1800 and started to see patterns that would otherwise have escaped me. For example, one of the terms I had assumed belonged firmly in the early modern period was ‘changeling’, but further discussion helped me to understand that this was a name used more frequently by Victorians to evoke the early modern. This has started off a new line of enquiry for my work! Above all, this rewarding day was characterised by excellent research, collegiate discussion and stimulating papers. Thank you so much for funding it!

Sara Zadrozny (Oxford)

 

 

As a PhD student of early modern history of medicine, this summer of attending conferences large and small showed me how precious topic-focused conferences are, as venues are rare where we can exchange views with other researchers knowledgeable and passionate about the history of health. Presenting at specialised conferences is invaluable as researchers of health-related topics ask questions from new angles that help you clarify your thoughts and explain your work to wider audiences. It was striking how much work is underway on women’s and children’s health after the first histories of medicine focused on male health in the late 1900s. Discussing Jennifer Evans’ work on how distressing male infertility was for individuals and families gave an insightful counterpoint to the well-known trope of infertility being women’s fault.

 Anita Hoffman (York)

 

Age and Health, 1500-1800 highlighted that the intersection between age and health is a fruitful line of inquiry for early modern social and cultural historians. Bringing that intersection to the foreground in our research opens new paths for thinking about gender and (medical) authority, as well as about health and the life cycle themselves.

 

About the Authors:

Olivia Formby is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge working on infants’ emotions in early modern England. She is interested in the intersections of religion, medicine, and the emotions in the history of childhood, and has recently started a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Jen McFarland is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge working on ideas and experiences of old age in early modern Italy. She is interested in in concepts of charity and marginality, health, neighbourhood, and the material cultures of domestic and urban space.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *