Author Archives: engl-admin

About the Medieval Literatures Center

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The Medieval Literatures Center is a research group housed in UCSB’s English Department. Our programming provides a space for anyone interested in the literature and culture of this formative period – recent events have included film screenings, game sessions, reading groups, and talks from visiting speakers. If you want more information about our center, or would like to hear about our future events, please follow the UCSB English Department on Instagram or reach out to the MLC Research Assistant (RA).

2026 – 27 Center Director: Daniel Reeve (danielreeve@english.ucsb.edu)

2026 – 27 Center RA: Gil Vitro (gvitro@ucsb.edu)

Medieval Talk This Thursday, 4/25

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THURSDAY, April 25th at noon in HSSB 4041
Nicole Archambeau, Dept of History & Religious Studies, UCSB
“Identifying Health Care Providers in the Later Middle Ages”

What did people in the 14th century do when they were sick? The answer
was often far more complex than traditional research in the history of
medicine shows. By sifting through the narratives of people coping
with their own and loved-ones’ health care, we find that people used
all available methods and even created new ones when needed. We also
see that medieval concepts of health care extended beyond the
boundaries of the physical body to include the passions or what
contemporaries called “accidents of the soul.” Healers and sufferers
saw that sadness, fear, and anxiety could damage physical health and
were health problems in their own right.