IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

In tracing our shared past throughout western Europe, we often rely on written records to give us this story. This can be problematic because there are two layers of obfuscation built into these records. First, there are the perspectives and opinions of the people who wrote the original records. Second, there are the perspectives and opinions of the people who, over the centuries, have curated these records into an archive. Published works are equally problematic because they are aspirational. If we look back at mediaeval texts written by men of the Church, or treatises from the early modern period on the variety of sociological problems that concerned them at the time, these are written as idealised guides of how society *should* function and behave, written from a white, Christian, male perspective. These will not be texts that actually document how real people worked, prayed, caroused, loved, and lived. How do we navigate this narrow and highly edited version of past events? There are several historians currently doing excellent work to untangle the truth from these misleading traces; however their findings are often only read within academic circles and this new knowledge is not easily accessible to the general public. My Arts Council England funded research project looks to uncover the hidden histories of women’s contributions to western European medicine. Titled ‘Women’s Weeds: from mediaeval cunning women to 19th-century feminist botany, the origins of women in medicine’, this project consists of one year of research into this history, culminating in several pieces of creative public engagement over the course of summer 2023 at the Museum of the Home in London, consisting of an exhibition, audio installations, talks, workshops, and community partnership collaborations. In this paper, I will share my preliminary research findings and the creative ways I aim to engage a general public audience with this unknown shared past.