Maaike van der Lugt

A historian of medieval medicine and natural philosophy, Maaike van der Lugt received her PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of Utrecht and her habilitation from the Université d’Orléans. She has held a chair in medieval history at the Université de Versailles – Paris-Saclay since 2017 and has been awarded fellowships by the Institut universitaire de France, the Wellcome Institute, and Princeton University. She was elected to the Comité National Français d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et Techniques in 2022.

Maaike van der Lugt has published extensively on theories of generation, heredity, and kinship; medieval concepts of nature, health, and disease; the relationship between science, religion, and magic; and the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Problems. Her research combines the analysis of texts produced in medieval schools and universities with the study of less technical sources and images. She is interested in the normative and moral authority of science, the material and social dimensions of the construction, circulation, and dissemination of knowledge, the process of vernacularization, and the relationship between book knowledge, practical know-how, and experience—especially women’s experience.

At the MPIWG, Maaike van der Lugt is a member of the Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body, ca. 800–1650,” where she will complete a book on medieval discourses on the fetus and continue her work on the concept of complexion. She is also developing a new project on theories and practices of bloodletting in the longue durée.

                                                          Publications

• « Les maladies héréditaires dans la pensée scolastique », in L’hérédité entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne. Perspectives historiques, M. van der Lugt et C.  de Miramon (ed.), (Micrologus’ Library), p. 273-320

• « Nature as Norm in Medieval Medical Discussions of Maternal Breastfeeding and Wet-Nursing », The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 49 (2019), p. 563-588

• « Formed Fetuses and Healthy Children in Scholastic Medicine, Theology and Law », dans Reproduction : Antiquity to the Present Day, Rebecca Flemming, Nick Hopwood, Lauren Kassell (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 167-180.

• « The Learned Physician as a Charismatic Healer ». Urso of Salerno (flourished end of twelfth century) on Incantations in Medicine, Magic, and Religion », Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87, p. 307-346.

• Le ver le démon et la vierge. Les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire. Une étude sur les rapports entre théologie, philosophie naturelle et médecine, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2004.