Retracing Connections |

08 Jun New Collaborative Research Centre in Literary Studies at Freiburg University

Posted at 13:17h in Uncategorized

Retracing Connections is happy to announce that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio ‘Historical and Transcultural Narratology’ at the University of Freiburg. Within this project, researchers are investigating narratives and narrative practices in various historical and cultural contexts. The spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Centre is the RC Advisory Board Member Prof. Dr Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg.

A new historical-transcultural narrative theory

People have always told stories. Across all eras and cultures, narratives have played a vital role in social cohesion. The new TRR Historical and Transcultural Narratology examines pre-modern narratives – that is, those from antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period – drawn from various cultural contexts. The TRR will test and further develop methods from the digital humanities in order to anchor comparative narrative research more firmly in the digital realm. For its research, the TRR utilises digital and AI-based methods, ranging from prompt engineering to more advanced AI architectures. The researchers’ aim is to develop a new historical-transcultural narrative theory that overcomes the narrow focus of current narrative theories on Western and modern or postmodern traditions. This new narrative theory is intended to encompass diverse historical narrative formats and functions from various cultural contexts. In doing so, the researchers will open up new avenues for comparative, interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies on a global scale.

“The Collaborative Research Centre promises a fundamental re-examination of storytelling in the past from a comparative perspective,” says spokesperson von Contzen. “The participating researchers come from 16 different disciplines, including Egyptology, Korean Studies, Theology, Classical Studies and Slavic Studies. We are exploring questions such as how people in past cultures told stories, in what contexts, for what purposes, and what their stories were like.”

The research findings are intended to facilitate a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural comparison of storytelling from a global perspective and to offer a fundamentally new insight into the origins, diversity and functions of narrative forms. Researchers from the consortium of the Universities of Freiburg, Bochum and Bonn will work closely with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg and the Bonn Centre for Digital Humanities.

We warmly congradulate Eva and her team and are looking forward to future collaborations!
You can read the full announcement here.

08 Jun Gynaecological Knowledge in Translation: Interview with Micaela Brembilla and Larisa Ficulle Santini

Posted at 12:44h in Into the Storyworlds

This spring, we have had the honor of hosting Larisa Ficulle Santini from the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a Retracing Connections guest researcher at Uppsala University. Larisa has been looking into translational aspects of her ongoing project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”. She has had a chance to collaborate with the UU recent doctoral graduate in Latin, Micaela Brembilla. We have also co-organized a seminar with the Uppsala University Centre for Medical Humanities, where Larisa’s and Micaela’s work has been commented by contemporary medical and phytopharmacological researchers and practitioners, Matts Olovsson and Sonny Larsson. Ingela Nilsson has asked Larisa and Micaela to introduce the connections between their topics and their relevance for today’s audiences.

I. N: You both work on texts that are in some sense medical, even if they sometimes transfer knowledge that is not scientific in the traditional sense. Do you think that texts like these were transmitted and translated in ways that are different from narrative texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages? If so, in what way?

M. B: I think that the practical and technical manuals of Late Antiquity have a particular transmission history due to their didactical nature. I can bring as an example the text I know best, Mustio’s Gynaecia, which is a practical handbook for the education of sixth century North African midwives. The most educational sections – like those on delivery featuring explicative drawings – on the one hand present a variety of additional material from one manuscript to the other, as if people using it wanted to complete the information with their own knowledge. On the other hand, they have often been separated from the Gynaecia, and integrated in other gynaecological texts during the Middle Ages, with no reference whatsoever to the author Mustio. Even though this is not what usually happens with the transmission of more prestigious authors – or, at least, this is what we believe – I think that transmission and use of narrative cores and themes is not that different from what we see in this type of texts.

L. F. S: Micaela is certainly right in emphasising the didactical and practical scope of these texts as the element to take into account in their transmission and translation. Another case in point is that of the Byzantine/eastern Roman physician Paul of Aegina (seventh century). Paul’s Pragmateia, a medical compendium written in Greek, contained several sections on gynaecology and obstetrics and enjoyed considerable success in both Syriac and Arabic medical traditions (especially from the nineth century onwards.) His gynaecological and obstetrical expertise was especially praised – up to the point that he was known in Arabic as “Paul the obstetrician”. What emerges from the translation process is far from being a literal translation, as we would say now, but more an adaptation. Certain sections are translated, others omitted, new information integrated. In other words, medical texts, in light of their practical nature, would be considered as more porous and prone to be integrated and modified, sometimes with other sources, sometimes with first-hand knowledge, within the translation process, depending on what the person who was translating would consider right, relevant, worthy of being transmitted, and what not. For those who are interested, the place to start for the fascinating subject of the Oriental tradition of Paul of Aegina is P. E. Pormann’s monograph (The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia, Leiden–Boston 2004).

I. N: The division between (male) medicine and (female) practice seems to be present both in the past and the present. Why is that? What could one do to change it?

L. F. S: For me, this is above all a question of authoritative knowledge, a concept developed by the anthropologist of birth and reproduction Brigitte Jordan and that is helping me a lot thinking about my own work. By this I mean: who holds the knowledge that counts socially and institutionally – not necessarily as the most accurate or correct, but the one that is recognised as legitimate. In patriarchal societies, men have historically held more authority than women, and in that sense, the issue is not simply a division between “male medicine” and “female practice”, but between different kinds of knowledge and unequal access to authority. In the past, this was of course closely tied to education. Literacy and advanced study were largely reserved for men, especially elite men, while women were mostly excluded from formal scholarly training. Today, at least in much of the Western world, the situation has changed significantly, and women are present in medicine in ways that would have been unimaginable in antiquity. Yet we face another problem: for a long time, the body that medicine studied and treated as the norm was overwhelmingly male – more specifically, male, white and able-bodied. This is one of the reasons why gender medicine has become so important. It reminds us that what counts as medical knowledge is never neutral.

M. B: I am not sure that the point is to eliminate such division. I think that the problem is that this division, in the past but also when it is detected in our times, is often rigid and judged qualitatively by society, with male, scientific and standardised knowledge recognised as more important and valid than the female, practical and oral one.

The concept of authoritative knowledge underlined by Larisa helps us address the question from a more refined angle than just the dichotomy of male and female. What these medical manuals do, in their process of defining the fundamental expertise for their contemporary midwives, is to crystallise the knowledge that they considered correct, raising themselves and their text as the authorities in the field. The process is very explicit in those passages where Mustio, in the Gynaecia for example, openly refuses and condemns other popular practices, saying that we don’t do this anymore, and presenting his own treatment and interpretation as the correct one. Among these practices, one can also identify things that women were doing, and that are now disregarded as old, ignorant and superstitious.

I. N: What does it mean to be a midwife? Are there similarities between the historical situations you study and the way we see the profession today?

M. B: I don’t think I am knowledgeable enough to answer this question from a contemporary perspective. What I would like to underline is that it is clear from Antiquity and beyond that the role of midwives is a unique and special one. They are present at one of the most traumatic experiences of life, both for the mother and the baby, and they engage with life and death. The process of childbirth is ultimately transcendental and therefore midwives’ role in it remains mysterious. Brigitte Jordan, the anthropologist already mentioned by Larisa, analyses the dichotomy “modern obstetrics vs traditional obstetrics”, i.e. a scientific and hospitalised approach vs a traditional and home-based one; she argues how this dichotomy is present in various degrees in our societies, and how does it affect the perception of childbirth and delivery.

Western civilisation has the tendency to consider traditional obstetrics as something obsolete in need to be integrated and ultimately surpassed. In a way, we can say that we see the same tendency in action in the special environment of 6th century Africa Romana, as we witness the attempt of male physicians to standardise and normalise the scientific knowledge of midwifery and gynaecology. In doing so, they for sure want to give better access to education to contemporary midwives, but they also contribute in distancing these women, and themselves, from the traditional practices transmitted outside the scientific literature.

L. F. S: I am not a midwife myself – I guess it would be better to ask them directly! My impression is that what it means to be a midwife depends very much on where one is a midwife. For example, when it comes to childbirth, we know that it can be organised in very different ways, depending especially on how medicalised birth is. Even within Europe today, the role of the midwife varies considerably. In some contexts, the birthing person depends primarily on an obstetrician; in others – especially where home-births are a common practice – the midwife is the central figure.

As a historian working on reproduction and fertility in Byzantium, I have the impression that the history of midwifery in Byzantium is still largely unwritten. We have a handful of studies, and many relevant sources still remain to be identified and analysed. For the moment, the most striking similarity I can see between past and present concerns the midwife’s position in relation to the male physician. I am thinking above all to the work of Aetius of Amida. In Book 16 of his medical compendium, when midwives appear, they are the ones who engage directly with the woman’s body through internal manual interventions. The male physician, by contrast, more often observes, diagnoses, and interprets. He is also the one associated with surgical procedures, whereas the midwife is usually not. I find this distinction – and its echoes in some contemporary situations – particularly revealing. It suggests not only a division of labour, but also a division in the access to the female body.

At the same time, sources such as Byzantine prayer books, the euchologia, show that the midwife remained present at important moments in the lives of both mother and child even after birth: for example, at naming rituals or the churching of the infant. It is also striking that the midwife, like the woman who has given birth, can appear as the recipient of prayers of purification after childbirth. By virtue of her close involvement in birth, she too was considered to have crossed a threshold that required ritual reintegration. That closeness matters. I imagine that something comparable may still be found in contexts where childbirth is less heavily medicalised and where midwives continue to play a central role.

I. N: Last but not least: why should we study these issues and their traditions?

L. F. S: This is perhaps the hardest question: the risk of giving an obvious or banal answer is around the corner. Rather than trying to offer a universal response, I can only give a personal one. As someone with a womb, working on the history of reproduction has felt like a call – perhaps even a responsibility, though a welcome one. For centuries, the history that was written and studied was overwhelmingly the history of elite men: kings, wars, political institutions. Later, social history broadened that perspective, and feminist scholarship pushed us to ask different questions and to look at different experiences. The history of reproduction – and also of non-reproduction – is part of that shift.

Even though most of our surviving sources were written by men, studying these materials allows us to come closer to the realities of historical women: women who struggled with infertility, women who became pregnant, who died in childbirth. Women who tried not to conceive or sought to terminate a pregnancy; women who lived with menstrual pain or irregularity. In other words, people whose lives were profoundly shaped by the presence of a uterus and by the biological and social meanings attached to it. For me, trying to recover these histories means recognising how deeply questions of reproduction have shaped human lives across time, even in periods when the room for agency, choice, and control was, generally speaking, more limited than it is today.

M. B: I would like to try and answer this question from a more specific point of view. Why should we study the issue of male and female division of knowledge? Traditional obstetrics, to adopt Jordan’s terminology, does not seem to be in relationship anymore with modern obstetrics, but our society seems to still apply a qualitative judgement to the dichotomy “male doctor vs female midwife”, even if midwives in our Western civilisation have access to high level education at universities and do not usually practice traditional obstetrics.

It is fundamental to try to understand the history and the origin of the bias towards female knowledge, and towards knowledgeable females, in order to approach it and fight it in our society. However, It is difficult to trace female agency and presence in such a male dominated area as ancient medicine. The traditional structure of these disciplines was shaped by male physicians mostly writing and talking to other males, and the analysis of sources can give us very little results if one is looking for female traces. Gynaecology and midwifery, however, for their very nature, may offer little cracks in the male facade of medicine, and give us the opportunity to detect also the female side of this discipline.

Micaela Brembilla graduated in Latin Linguistics at Università Statale di Milano in 2020, under the supervision of Paola Francesca Moretti. She defended her PhD thesis, entitled Prolegomena to a New Critical Edition of Mustio’s Gynaecia at Uppsala University in December 2025. She is currently working on the production of the critical edition, while deepening her research on female participation in Late Antique medical environment, women’s medical education and midwives’ folkloric and practical knowledge.

Larisa Ficulle Santini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the FWF-ESPRIT Project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”.

11 May Classical, Medieval, Oriental: Disciplinary Ideologies – Retracing Connections online research dialogue

Posted at 12:35h in Other

The Swedish Institute at Athens & the Retracing Connections Research Programme, invite you to the sixth Retracing Connections online research dialogue.
Join us with Aileen Das (University of Michigan), N. İpek Hüner (Boğaziçi University) and Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala University) for an online discussion about
Classical, Medieval, Oriental: Disciplinary Ideologies.

The Dialogue takes place online via Zoom on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, at 18.00 (Athens).
Sign up here!

Despite the ever-increasing focus on interdisciplinarity, there are certain boundaries that seem more than difficult than others to cross. Classical philologist may turn to postclassical texts, but they often do it from the same classicist position, without taking the later context fully into account. Arabic-Greek relations are discussed from whatever position the scholar in question take: as reception/translation of one or the other, but rarely as a relational situation of equal importance for both fields. Medieval Studies tend to indicate the European West – rarely the so-called Orient, and most often not even Byzantium. What does this situation mean for the understanding of the material we study? And what does it do to us as scholars?

04 May Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium – Book Promotion

Posted at 11:32h in Uncategorized

Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium (Routledge Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies Series, 2026) focuses on conceptions of spatial liminality in the Byzantine world by offering a novel interdisciplinary approach—combining concepts from social anthropology (liminality) and cultural geography (space) as methodological tools for historical investigation. Co-edited by Buket Kitapçı Bayrı and Myrto Veikou, the volume stems from a conference held in April 2023 at the Swedish Institute at Athens, organized in collaboration with the research program Retracing Connections: Byzantine Storyworlds in Greek, Arabic, Georgian, and Old Slavonic Slavonic (c. 950–c. 1100) ) (Uppsala University and Riksbankens Jubileumfond). Its main aim is to challenge binary oppositions such as inside/outside, core/periphery, isolation/connectedness, stability/instability, known/unknown, earthly/heavenly, self/other, and good/bad by presenting liminality as an epistemological tool.

Across eleven chapters, the contributors explore whether certain types of spaces—such as rivers, deserts, islands, forests, mountains, houses, thresholds, gates, monasteries, lighthouses, and bridges—accommodate or even generate liminal situations in the perceptions of those who experience them. These spaces, along with the spatial practices and imaginings they inspire, are examined within their social and historical contexts to determine when, by whom, and why they were perceived as liminal. The volume also considers the effects of such spaces on the creation of new and alternative realities.

Organized as a collaboration of ANAMED and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, this event welcomes Buket Kitapçı Bayrı, the volume’s co-editor, alonside Rebecca Darley, the volume’s English copy editor and ANAMED’s current senior fellow.

Together, they will introduce the book’s key themes and discuss the intersections of liminality, space, and spatial practices in Byzantium.

The event will take place in English with simultaneous Turkish translation at ANAMED Auditorium, İstiklal Caddesi No: 181 Merkez Han 34433 Beyoğlu İstanbul, Türkiye, İstanbul, 17:00 – 18:30, on 11 May 2026. More information.

09 Feb The Poetics of Eastern Christianity Workshop

Posted at 11:45h in Other

Sankt Ignatios College in Stockholm and the Retracing Connections Progarmme are co-organizing a one-day workshop on the Poetics of Eastern Christianity. The workshop will take place on February 11, 2026 at Sankt Ignatios College, Nygatan 2, Södertälje.