***PLEASE, DO FEEL FREE TO CIRCULATE***
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
Panel sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of
Natural History, Botany
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Renaissance
Society of America, 2004 meeting will be organized in New York, the
founding city of the Society, on March 25-27.
A panel/set of panels will be organized on the printing of
ancient medical texts in the Renaissance. “Big pictures” of the
history of medicine tell, indeed, that the ancient legacy -
particularly Greek medicine - was recovered at that time and
assimilated into contemporary practice, particularly thanks to the
printing press and the higher circulation of texts it made possible.
The proposed panel(s) aim(s) to verify 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 copy run
of the printed versions and what was their diffusion?
On these and other similar questions, papers will bring new
elements to light so as to verify the importance and process of
printing medical texts in the Renaissance. Please send proposals to
atouwaide@hotmail.com. Deadline to submit proposals to the
Renaissance Society is May 18, 2003.
For more information about the meeting, see www.r-s-a.org,
click <Conference New York 2004>.
Alain TOUWAIDE
Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History
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