Sharing Secret Information: The Conservation and Application of Late Medieval Occult Knowledge

About the Lecture

In his presentation Dr. Michael A. Ryan addresses two related projects. In both, he investigates how bodies of privileged and specialized magical, medical, alchemical, and astrological knowledge, often conserved in compendia like books of secrets, recipe collections, and/or alchemical miscellanies, fit within a broader late medieval mindset regarding magic and the occult. The information contained within these sources, which increased in number in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a response to larger political, economic, and demographic crises, could be used—or not—by their practitioners as they so wished. The first project focuses on his recently completed manuscript, a study on charlatans and the bodies of occult and magical knowledge they had at their disposal, and how individuals policed and responded to such information in fifteenth century Venice. The second project turns to the other side of the late medieval Mediterranean, focusing on two lives—one male, one female and both practitioners of the occult—in fourteenth-century Barcelona and its environs. Comparing the lives of and responses to Geralda de Codines, a female healer and magician in Subirats in the early fourteenth century and Guillem Sedacer, a compiler of alchemical recipes at the closing of the century, evidences how their claims to truth and efficacy collided with significant changes in institutional thought regarding the acceptability of such knowledge and when, how, and by whom it could be deployed.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Ryan is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research and teaching foci include the intersection of magic, science, and religion in the premodern world, apocalyptic expectations and apprehensions in premodern society, medieval relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, urban history, and the history of gender and sexuality. He is currently working on a new monograph that investigates charlatanry and magical-themed fraud in the later Middle Ages.

Related Event:

The Wangensteen Historical Library is full of secrets: secrets about nature, secrets about the body, whole books of secrets! Come to our Pop-Up Exhibit in 2-330 Phillips-Wangensteen Building on Thursday, September 11th from Noon - 2 pm to discover all of the secrets the collection holds! Tell all your friends or don't.......

Sponsors

This Homecoming Series lecture features Dr. Michael A. Ryan an alumnus of the UMN History Department. Sponsors for this event include the Department of History and the CPS Medieval Studies Fund, including donations made in honor of Professor Bernard Bachrach.