Prof. Naama Cohen Hanegbi

I study late medieval society and culture through the prism of the body, health, knowledge, faith and religious belonging. My first book studied late medieval medical understanding of the soul and the emotions and examined the links and mutual influence between medical thought and practice and ideas about sin and penance. I then turned to study the writings and history of Juan of Aviñón whose fascinating story led me to examine late 14^th century Christian healthcare in Castile. In recent years, my work has focused on cases of postpartum mental distress in the later Middle Ages. This study considers issues such as purity and time, mental instability, demonology and childbirth. In MedPlaceboEffect, we study the roles of hope, belief and trust in late medieval Southern European healthcare.

I am director of The Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies and co-editor of Mediterranean Historical Review

Select Publications:

“Records of Trusted Medicines: Don Meir Alguades’ Segulot Muvḥanyot in Context.” Early Science and Medicine 29:2 (2024): 170-192.

Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Guy Erez, "The womb as a wild mother beast." Postmedieval 15 (2024): 301–328.

"A Healthy Christian City: Christianizing Healthcare in Late Fourteenth Century Seville." Journal of Medieval History 48:5 (2022): 664- 685.

"Experiences: Feeling Unhealthy in Late Medieval Europe." in The Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages ed. Iona McCleery (London: Berg, 2021), pp. 131-153.

“Postpartum Mental Distress in Late Medieval Europe.” The Mediaeval Journal 9:1 (2019): 109-141.

Learning Practice from Texts: Jews and Medicine in the Later Middle Ages, special cluster, Social History of Medicine 32:4 (2019).

With Piroska Nagy, eds., Pleasure in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).

Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

"Jean of Avignon: Conversing in Two Worlds," Medieval Encounters 22 (2016): 165-192.

"A Moving Soul: Emotions in Late Medieval Medicine," Osiris 31 (2016): 1-21.