Drugs in the Medieval World (ca. 1050–ca. 1400), King’s College London, December 7–8, 2018

From the mid-eleventh century onwards the Mediterranean world was a hotbed of transcultural interactions to an even greater degree than had been the case in the past.  The field of pharmacology is particularly significant in this historical context in both social and cultural terms, because it involved practical matters, such as the administration of drugs, thus impacting on the everyday life of a large number of people of all social classes. Yet we lack comparative studies in this field or studies on the interrelationship between the different Mediterranean traditions, including the Byzantine, Islamic and Latin Western traditions, as well as on the role of minority ethno-religious groups, such as the Jews in the process of knowledge exchange. This conference seeks to promote discussion and research on the evidence for interaction between different cultures and regions in the medieval Mediterranean in an attempt to create a much more detailed and critical narrative. In doing so, it also aims to foster dialogue between scholars and disciplines by focusing, inter alia, on the following topics:

• transfer of pharmacological knowledge
• drug experimentation and drug therapy
• drugs as commodities (e.g. trade, diplomacy, consumption)
• drugs outside medicine (e.g. magic, alchemy)
• discovering new material in medieval pharmacology

Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, in the framework of the research project ‘Experiment and Exchange: Byzantine Pharmacology between East and West (ca. 1150-ca. 1450)’. Organised by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Dionysios Stathakopoulos