Currently, I am working on a monograph project that stems from my dissertation, which uses images, diagrams, and other visual cues in manuscripts made in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to analyze ideas about observation and first-hand experience articulated in medieval medical theory and practice. I argue that a subset of late medieval image production often disregarded by art historians as crude or practical – images related to medicine and healing – offers an explicit period theory of how bodies ought to be looked at, what knowledge can be gained by looking, and how images could train visual skill.
