Event Details

Sadegh Attari (Birmingham) & Dr Rachel White (Durham) present papers on medieval plagues and Early Modern astrology in the atmospheric surroundings of Lancaster Castle.

Sadegh Attari (Birmingham) - 'Infectious Assemblages: Plague, Leprosy, and Bodily Porousness in Late Medieval Middle English Sermons’

This paper examines the entanglement of plague and leprosy in polemical Late Medieval Middle English sermons. In drawing on medical theorisations of infection, the sermons explored the interaction between the materiality and discursivity of diseases, sins, and the bodies impacted by them. In the medical thinking, the body’s absorption of corrupt matter in air, water, food, etc. as well as the germination of such corrupt humours due to sinfulness and imbalanced lifestyle resulted in the contraction of diseases such as plague and leprosy. While orthodox preachers compared the influence of Lollardy to the spread of pestilence (and occasionally leprosy), Lollard preachers used the metaphor of the leprous body to describe a corrupt and corrupting clerical class. Consequently, the body susceptible to infection as well as the infected body, both of which open to receive and spread material and spiritual corruption, became a material-discursive assemblage which disseminated an understanding of the human body as porous, malleable, and open to creating networks with nonhuman entities such as those operative in the engendering of plague and leprosy.

Sadegh Attari is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham.

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Dr Rachel White (Durham) - ‘William Bellgrave’s Astrological Notebook (c.1627-1693)’.

Once believed lost but now held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Willam Bellgrave’s (1627-c.1693) ‘Astrological Notebook’ presents a fascinating insight into the role of astrology in everyday lives during the seventeenth century. A self-taught astrologer and meticulous note-taker, Bellgrave’s notebook contains pages of horoscopes and astrological calculations which focus of the lives of he and his family. For Bellgrave, the movement of the stars portended all aspects of his life including periods of ill-health, financial successes, personal purchases, the natural world around him, his business, and the death of his son. Anything that he thought was significant is recorded in careful detail alongside astrological calculations. Bellgrave is also able to reconcile astrology with the new astronomy, and so this notebook provides evidence against the theory that the two diverged during the seventeenth century and were, at least in the eyes of amateur practitioners such as Bellgrave, compatible.

This paper will examine different features of this unique notebook, beginning with Bellgrave’s many entries appertaining to his health and medical condition. It will explore some of the mysterious annotations that fill pages of neatly drawn horoscopes for every year of his life. Finally, this paper will explore Bellgrave’s notebook as more than a careful astrological record of his life, but as a space in which he could find meaning and even allow his emotions to spread across the page.

Dr Rachel White is a teaching Fellow at the University of Durham.