{"id":7141,"date":"2019-06-25T12:27:13","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T11:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/?p=7141"},"modified":"2019-06-25T12:27:13","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T11:27:13","slug":"cfp-for-the-conference-magic-and-medicine-in-the-ancient-world-vitoria-gasteiz-september-18-19-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/cfp-for-the-conference-magic-and-medicine-in-the-ancient-world-vitoria-gasteiz-september-18-19-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Cfp for the conference:\u00a0“Magic and Medicine in the Ancient World”. Vitoria-Gasteiz, September 18-19, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
Call for papers for the conference:<\/div>\n
\n
*Magic and Medicine in the Ancient World*<\/div>\n
*Interactions, Convergences and divergences in a Complicated Romance *<\/div>\n
International Conference, Vitoria-Gasteiz, September 18-19, 2019<\/div>\n
In Antiquity, as is still very much the case today, illness and disease<\/div>\n
could trigger a personal crisis in which a range of emotions from<\/div>\n
uncertainty and restlessness to hope played a leading role. Given that in<\/div>\n
such situations plagued with anxiety no one remedy was often enough to put<\/div>\n
the ill at ease, the suffering often took recourse to all available<\/div>\n
resources, both terrestrial and supernatural, in order to obtain a<\/div>\n
longed-for cure. Accordingly, in many times and places medicine has gone<\/div>\n
hand in hand with magical-religious practices. Indeed, since the<\/div>\n
effectiveness of medical and therapeutical remedies were largely seen to<\/div>\n
depend on the favorable intervention of a deity, these two types of<\/div>\n
procedures were thought to work in tandem to bring about a patient\u2019s<\/div>\n
recovery.<\/div>\n
If medicine is a discipline that seeks to restore an individual\u2019s health<\/div>\n
through empirical observation and the application of therapeutic remedies,<\/div>\n
magic purports to influence a patient by supernatural means. Both medicine<\/div>\n
and magic attempt to act upon the body, where these two forces can either<\/div>\n
cooperate or, alternatively, vie with one another. Therefore, while<\/div>\n
magical-religious practices could certainly work in conjunction with<\/div>\n
medical treatments to cure the body through the use of amulets or<\/div>\n
apotropaic objects, it is equally true that those same practices could be<\/div>\n
used to attack the body, bombarding it with all sorts of spells and curses.<\/div>\n
The ways in which medicine and magical-religious practices were perceived<\/div>\n
to work together during Antiquity undoubtedly vary depending on the<\/div>\n
specific historical and cultural context. In Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt,<\/div>\n
arcane medical practices, for instance, are characterized by the equally<\/div>\n
important role played by medical and magical-religious practices. This<\/div>\n
helps explain why preserved recipes contain spells meant to cure diseases<\/div>\n
caused by gods or demons. The magical aspects of these diseases, which are<\/div>\n
clearly seen in the perceived causes and cures of these illnesses, are<\/div>\n
always accompanied by (presumably) curative ingredients. Despite the<\/div>\n
undeniable advances in medical knowledge, Greek and Roman societies, for<\/div>\n
their part, lent enormous importance to supernatural manifestations. Even<\/div>\n
after the birth of scientific medicine in sixth and fifth-century Greece,<\/div>\n
the link between magic and medicine did not dissolve. In fact, this link<\/div>\n
was influenced by new theories about diseases and cures as well as by<\/div>\n
skepticism towards already accepted theories. Something similar is afoot in<\/div>\n
Rome: upon its arrival to the *urbs* in the third century BCE, scientific<\/div>\n
medicine lived side-by-side with popular medicine, which was strongly<\/div>\n
influenced by magic, in the contemporary clinical theories that prestigious<\/div>\n
Greek doctors expounded. By the second century CE, however, Galen denounced<\/div>\n
the quacks that practiced a type of medicine based in spells. The vehemence<\/div>\n
of his condemnation betrays the success of this type of medical practice in<\/div>\n
second-century Rome.<\/div>\n
While throughout Antiquity we can trace patterns of interaction and<\/div>\n
influence between magic and medicine that result from historical cultural<\/div>\n
idiosyncrasies, we should not run the risk of suggesting that this<\/div>\n
relationship was static at any point: on the contrary, in any cultural<\/div>\n
context the relationship between medicine and magic is a fluid one whose<\/div>\n
limits and borders are often blurred and murky (see, for example, the<\/div>\n
particularly slippery lexeme \u03c6\u1f71\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1\u03ba\u03bf\u03bd, which not only can refer to a<\/div>\n
\u2018poison\u2019 or \u2018medicine,\u2019 as Derrida famously argued, but also to a \u2018spell\u2019,<\/div>\n
\u2018charm\u2019 or \u2018philtre\u2019). The relationship between both forces is undoubtedly<\/div>\n
an extremely rich and complex one, upon which a range of sources, such as<\/div>\n
clay tablets, literary and juridical sources, iatromagical papyri and the<\/div>\n
epigraphic record broadly speaking, shed light.<\/div>\n
This workshop seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum in which new<\/div>\n
approaches to the relationship between magic and medicine can be discussed<\/div>\n
and debated. We invite scholars of antiquity (e.g. historians, epigraphers,<\/div>\n
archaeologists, papyrologists, philologists, cultural theorists and<\/div>\n
philosophers) who have completed a doctoral dissertation and have a<\/div>\n
developed academic interest in the topic to submit an abstract on the<\/div>\n
interaction between magic and medicine in ancient Mediterranean cultures.<\/div>\n
We are eager to receive proposals that tackle this question from early<\/div>\n
Mesopotamian cultures and Egypt all the way through Late Antiquity. We<\/div>\n
welcome scholars working with any type of evidence (literary,<\/div>\n
archeological, epigraphic, papyrological, etc.).<\/div>\n
Those who are interested in participating in the workshop should send an<\/div>\n
abstract (ca. 250-300 words written in Spanish, English, French or Italian)<\/div>\n

to\u00a0magandmed2019@gmail.com<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\u00a0mag&med2019@gmail.com<\/a>>. Speakers will be<\/p>\n

allotted 20 minutes to present their research as well as an additional 10<\/div>\n
minutes to field questions. Abstracts should be sent by June 30, 2019. As<\/div>\n
soon as the organizing committee has reviewed all proposals, speakers will<\/div>\n
be contacted in July.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Call for papers for the conference: *Magic and Medicine in the Ancient World* *Interactions, Convergences and divergences in a Complicated Romance * International Conference, Vitoria-Gasteiz,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferenze"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"fr","enabled_languages":["it","en","fr"],"languages":{"it":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"fr":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7141"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7144,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141\/revisions\/7144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lama.fileli.unipi.it\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}