About

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine specializing in the history of the premodern period and the comparative history of global health. Trained in the History of Science at Princeton University, she has taught and held fellowships at leading institutions such as Duke University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and All Souls College. Both her research and her teaching have been honored by top prizes, and she was recently recognized by having a prize named in her honor by the Medieval Academy of America. She is currently completing The Black Death: A Global History, which melds new insights from genetics with a reinterrogation of the documentary record of the world’s most devastating pandemic. She can be followed on Twitter at @monicaMedHist.

Please see my Academia.edu page for my most recent work: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen.

Education

Barnard College, B.A. (1978), Medieval Studies

Princeton University, M.A. (1981), History of Science

Princeton University, Ph.D. (1985), History of Science. PhD thesis: “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease Through the Early Middle Ages”

Other Publications

[partial list]

Books

(1) with Robert Hymes: New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2022)

(2) Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ISBN-13: 978-0-19-921149-4, awarded the 2009 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize by the History of Science Society in recognition of an outstanding book on the history of women in science published in the previous two-year period

(3) The ‘Trotula’: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), ISBN 978-0-8122-1808-4

(4) The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ISBN 978-0-8122-3589-0 — nominated for the 2004 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize in gender and health, awarded by the Society for Medical Anthropology; (5) Italian translation: Trotula. Un compendio medievale di medicina delle donne, A cura di Monica H. Green. Traduzione italiana di Valentina Brancone, Edizione Nazionale La Scuola Medica Salernitana, 4 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2009), ISBN 978-88-8450-336-7; e-book edition, under the title Trotula: Medicina e cosmesi delle donne nel Medioevo, medi@evi.digital medieval folders, 04 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014), http://www.sismel.it/tidetails.asp?hdntiid=1408&hdnLanguage=EN

(6) Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), ISBN 0-86078-826-1— co-winner of the 2004 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, given for “a first book in the medieval field judged to be of outstanding quality”

 

edited special issues and books

(7) Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica H. Green, TMG Occasional Publications 1 (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc Medieval Press, 2015), ISBN 978-1-942401-00-1

(8) “Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death,” inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), available open-access here: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1

(9) “Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,” Special Issue of Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (June 2008)[1]

invited comment

(10) “When Feminism Isn’t Enough,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 57, no. 2 (2022), 191-197

(11) “How a Microbe Becomes a Pandemic: A New Story of the Black Death,” Lancet Microbe 1, no. 8 (7 December 2020), e311-312

refereed articles & book chapters 

(12) “The Pandemic Arc: Expanded Narratives in the History of Global Health,” submitted to Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science

(13) “In and Beyond the Beneventan Zone: The Transformation of Latin Medicine in the Eleventh Century,” to appear in: Brill Companion to the Beneventan Zone, ed. Andrew J. Irving and Richard Gyug (submitted May 2021, accepted Sept 2022)

(14) “Plague (Yersinia pestis),” Encyclopedia of the History of Science, general ed. Christopher J. Phillips (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service), forthcoming

(15) “A New Definition of the Black Death: Genetic Findings and Historical Interpretations,” De Medio Aevo 11, no. 2 (2022), 139-55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/dmae.83788. Part of a special issue: La Peste Negra. Reacciones ante la pandemia en la Edad Media. The Black Death. Reactions to the Pandemic in the Middle Ages

(16) “Putting Asia on the Black Death Map,” The Medieval Globe 8, no. 1 (2022), 59-87; reprinted in Robert Hymes and Monica H. Green, edited by Carol Symes, New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2022)

(17) with Jonathan Hsy, “Disability, Disease, and a Global Middle Ages,” in: Teaching the Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine Heng, MLA Options for Teaching  (New York: PMLA, 2022), pp. 302-14

(18) “Out of the East (and West and South): A Response to Philip Slavin,” Past and Present,  256, no. 1 (August 2022), 283-323 (published online 9 March 2022)

(19) with Nahyan Fancy, “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258),” Medical History 65, no. 2 (April 2021), 157-177

(20) “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains,” online only

(21) “Medicine in France and England in the Long Twelfth Century: Inheritors and Creators of European Medicine,” in: France et Angleterre: manuscrits médiévaux entre 700 et 1200, ed. Charlotte Denoël and Francesco Siri, Bibliologia 57 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 363-388

(22) “What Places Ebola in the Realm of the ‘Global’? A View from History,” in The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease, ed. Andrea Patterson and Ian Read (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), pp. 328-362

(23) “Emerging Diseases, Re-emerging Histories,” Centaurus 62, no. 2 (2020), 238-251, part of a “Spotlight” issue, Histories of Epidemics in the Time of COVID-19

(24) with Lori Jones, “The Evolution and Spread of Major Human Diseases in the Indian Ocean World,” in Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Eva-Marie Knoll, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 25-57

(25) “Wie man lernt, den Schwarzen Tod zu unterrichten: Vorschläge für Seminarsequenzen zur mittelalterlichen Pest,” Zeitarbeit: Aus- und Weiterbildungszeitschrift für die Geschichtswissenschaften 1 (1), 8-24. https://doi.org/10.25521/ztbt.2019.126. [German translation of “On Learning How to Teach the Black Death” (originally appeared in: HPS&ST Note, March 2018)]

(26) “Recovering ‘Ancient’ Gynaecology: The Humanist Rediscovery of the Eleventh-Century Gynaecological Corpus,” in Transmission of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Outi Merisalo, Miika Kuha, and Susanna Niiranen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 45-54

(27) Gloriosissimus Galienus: Galen and Galenic Writings in the 11th- and 12th-Century Latin West,” in: Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen, ed. Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser, Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception, 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 319-342

(28) “Putting Africa on the Black Death Map: Narratives from Genetics and History,” Afriques 9 (24 December 2018), http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125

(29) “Medical Books,” in The European Book in the Twelfth Century, ed. Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 277-292

(30) “Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.6

(31) “Black as Death” [essay review of Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016)], Inference: International Review of Science 4, no. 1 (1 June 2018), http://inference-review.com/article/black-as-death, ISSN 2576-4403

(32) response to John Brooke, “Thinking Big About Plague,” Inference: International Review of Science 4, no. 2 (20 October 2018), https://inference-review.com/letter/thinking-big-about-the-plague

(33) response to Daniel Curtis and Joris Roosen, “On the Importance of History,” Inference: International Review of Science 4, no. 2 (20 October 2018), https://inference-review.com/letter/on-the-importance-of-history

(34) “Richard de Fournival and the Reconfiguration of Learned Medicine in the Mid-13th Century,” in Richard de Fournival et les sciences au XIIIe siècle, ed. Joëlle Ducos and Christopher Lucken, Micrologus Library, 88 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018), pp. 179-206

(35) with Helen King, “On the Misuses of Medical History,” The Lancet 391 (7 April 2018), 1354-55

(36) “The Globalisations of Disease,” in Human Dispersal and Species Movement: From Prehistory to the Present, ed. Nicole Boivin, Rémy Crassard, and Michael D. Petraglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 494-520, ISBN 9781107164147

(37) “The Black Death and Ebola: On the Value of Comparison,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica H. Green, TMG Occasional Publications 1 (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc Medieval Press, 2015), pp. ix-xx

(38) “Genetics as a Historicist Discipline: A New Player in Disease History,” Perspectives on History 52, no. 9 (December 2014), 30-31, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2014/genetics-as-a-historicist-discipline

(39) “Editor’s Introduction” to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), 9-26

(40) “Taking ‘Pandemic’ Seriously: Making the Black Death Global,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), 27-61

(41) with Kathleen Walker-Meikle and Wolfgang Müller, “Diagnosis of a ‘Plague’ Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), 309-26[1]

(42) with Lori Jones, Lester K. Little, Uli Schamiloglu, and George D. Sussman, “Yersinia pestis and the Three Plague Pandemics,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 14 (October 2014), 918, a comment on Wagner DM, Klunk J, Harbeck M, et al. Yersinia pestis and the Plague of Justinian 541–543 AD: a genomic analysis. Lancet Infect Dis 2014; 14: 319–26

(43) “Caring for Gendered Bodies,” in Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 345-61

(44) “The Value of Historical Perspective,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Globalization of Health, ed. Ted Schrecker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 17-37

(45) “Making Motherhood in Medieval England: The Evidence from Medicine,” in Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400-1400: Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser, ed. Conrad Leyser and Lesley Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 173-203

(46) “Moving from Philology to Social History: The Circulation and Uses of Albucasis’s Latin Surgery in the Middle Ages,” in Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Florence Eliza Glaze and Brian Nance, Micrologus’ Library, 30 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011), pp. 331-72

(47) “Introduction,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 1-17 (notes, pp. 233-35)

(48) “Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 149-72 (notes, pp. 264-68)

(49) “The Diversity of Human Kind,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 173-90 (notes, pp. 268-71)

Blog Posts

    Upcoming Talks and Conferences

    July 2023 – “How the Black Death Became ‘Global’: Plague Focalization and Epidemic Perceptions in the 14th Century,” to be presented at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds University, sessions on “Disease in the Medieval Islamicate World,” 4 July 2023

    September 2023 – “When Microbes Become Visible: Plague, SARS-CoV-2, and the History of Human-Animal-Microbe Connections,” to be presented at the Microbial Multiverse Symposium: Microbes in Society, September 14–16, 2023, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne (invited)

    Memberships

    Medieval Academy of America (Elected Fellow since 2011, member since 1981)

    American Association for the History of Medicine (life member, member since 1982)

    Middle East Medievalists (life member, since 2023)

    Monica H. Green

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