Call for Papers - Renaissance Society of America, 50th Annual Meeting, New York City, March 25-27, 2004

Medicine in the Renaissance: Printing the Ancient Legacy

A panel/set of panels will be organized on the printing of ancient medical texts in the Renaissance. It is a commonplace in the history of medicine that, thanks to the printing press and the higher circulation of texts it made possible, the legacy of ancient medicine--Greek medicine, in particular--was recovered and assimilated into contemporary practice.

The proposed panel(s) aim(s) to assess the importance attributed to printing and explore the material dimension of the phenomenon. Papers will deal with such questions as: what texts were available in manuscript form? What was their diffusion? Were scholars associated to the printing enterprise? If so, who were they and what kind of collaboration did they have with printers and publishers? What criteria did scholars, printers and/or publishers use to chose texts to be printed? Were they concerned with actual medical problems? Once the decision of printing a text was made, where did editors find manuscript(s) to be used as sources for printed editions and, if they had several copies at their disposal, how did they make the selection? What was the editorial process? What was the print run of the printed versions and what was their diffusion? How were illustrations incorporated into the printed versions?

Please send proposals via email. Deadline to submit proposals to the Renaissance Society is May 18, 2003.

Panel sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Botany

For more information about the meeting, see our website, click Conference New York 2004.