Dr Sophie Mann

Office: Phone: Email: Office Hours:

Rm 3.53, third floor, Faculty of Arts Building 024 76572794, internal extension 72794 S.Mann.2@warwick.ac.uk Tuesdays 10:00-11:00 (online); Thursdays 13:00-14:00 (in person)

 

Academic Profile

• 2018 onwards: Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
• 2015-2018: Teaching Fellow in the History of Science and Medicine, University of Warwick
• 2014-2015: Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Essex

Teaching

• HI3T3 The Early Modern Body (undergraduate final-year option module)
• HI2K9 Historical Research (undergraduate second-year core module)
• HI281 Being Human: Human Nature from the Renaissance to Freud (undergraduate second-year option module)
• HI907 Themes and Methods in Medical History (MA core module)
• HI991 Matters of Life and Death: Topics in the Medical Humanities (MA module)
• HI993 Themes and Approaches in the Historical Study of Religious Cultures (MA module)

Research

My research interests lie in the histories of medicine, science and religion, focusing on the interactions between these realms of belief and practice c.1500-1800.

My monograph Double Nature, Double Care: Religion and Medicine in Early Modern England is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. The book explores how people, both learned and lay, envisaged themselves as ‘double’ in ‘nature’, which precipitated an intense focus on the faculties of the soul and how they related to embodied life. In this context, contemporaries understood the interaction between body and soul in explicitly therapeutic terms and assigned therapeutic qualities to religious practices such as prayer, repentance and confession. When a person fell sick, they required what contemporaries referred to as ‘double care’: therapeutic acts catering to a patient’s material and immaterial faculties. This book recovers the history of these practices. It also explores how such practices operated in confessionally plural communities, further deepening our grasp of the complex interactions between faith, medicine and health.

My new research project, "Chronic Illness in Early Modern England", investigates how people conceptualised and managed chronic illness in an age where quick cure and straightforward recovery were rarely the norm. It will uncover how both trained practitioners and laypeople thought about and experienced the features of chronicity: uncertain diagnoses, fluctuating or lingering symptoms, relief and relapse, and existences on the margins between health and sickness, and sickness and death. The project also considers what pre-modern frameworks might offer us as we move into an era where straightforward cure is no longer guaranteed. The rise of long COVID, autoimmune disease and other poorly understood chronic conditions has challenged contemporary health systems built around acute care and resolution. At the same time, antibiotic resistance threatens to erode the curative assumptions that underpin modern biomedicine. The early modern experience, where individuals engaged in a near-continuance striving towards health, and where illness was often managed without resolution, offers a rich historical parallel, and perhaps, a reservoir of adaptive strategies to draw on.

Centres and Networks

Centre for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology (Co-Director)

Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre

Publications

• Double Nature, Double Care: Religion and Medicine in Early Modern England (forthcoming with Manchester University Press).
• “A Double Care: Prayer as Therapy in Early Modern England”, Social History of Medicine, 33, 4 (2020): 1055–1076 https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkz016.
• “Physic and Divinity: The Case of Dr John Downes M.D. (1627-1694)”, The Seventeenth Century 31, 4 (2016): 451-
  470.
• “A Dose of Physic: Confessional Identity and Medical Practice within the Family”, Studies in Church History, Volume 50: Religion and the Household, eds. John Doran and Charlotte Methuen (Woodbridge, 2014).
• Review of Anne Stobart, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), English Historical Review.
• Review of Isla Fay, Health and the City: Disease, Environment and Government in Norwich, 1200-1575 (Boydell Press, 2015), English Historical Review.
• Review of Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (John Hopkins University Press, 2014), IHR Reviews in History.
• Review of Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (eds), Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660–1760 (Ashgate, 2014), Women’s History Review.

PhD Supervision

I am happy to supervise a wide range of PhD topics related to medicine, science and religion in early modernity.

Current Students

• Carly Suri, "Disability, Sin and Redemption: The Representation and Experience of Lameness in Early Modern England" (co-supervised with Prof Peter Marshall)
• Louisa Pickard, "Performing Periods: Uncovering the Shame Surrounding Menstruation in Early Modern Arts" (co-supervised with Prof Erin Sullivan, Birmingham)