Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine and health. She has worked throughout her career in the field of medieval European medical history. Her early career work focused on the history of women’s healthcare in Europe, where she surveyed the entire corpus of pre-1500 texts in that field. In recent years, her interest in the history of the world’s leading infectious diseases, including plague, leprosy, and HIV/AIDS, has allowed her to expand her teaching and research into Global History. Her most recent studies identify the origins of the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic) and propose new alliances between documentary, bioarchaeological, and palaeoscientific approaches to disease history.

Her work has been supported by multiple funding sources, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), and All Souls College (Oxford). Two of her books won top prizes: *Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts*, which was co-winner of the 2004 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America; and *Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology*, which won the 2009 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize by the History of Science Society. Likewise, she has won teaching awards from the History of Science Society (2014) and the Medieval Academy of America (2018).

She has edited special issues of two journals: a volume on “Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages” (Journal of Medieval History, June 2008); and the inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe, on the topic of “Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death” (Fall 2014). In 2008, she founded MEDMED-L, an international, multi-disciplinary discussion list for researchers of pre-modern health and medicine.

Currently, she is working on three major projects: (1) an open-access teaching module on the Black Death (due for release Summer 2024), which frames it for the first time as a semi-global pandemic that struck much of both Eurasia and Africa, starting in the 13th century; (2) a research volume that lays out the evidence for this re-conceived long chronology of the Black Death, and its causes in environmental and climatic changes; and (3) a monograph on the radical transition in European medicine in the 11th and 12th centuries, which was the first field of science to absorb the theories and therapeutic practices from the Islamic world.

Her professional affiliations include:

• Medieval Academy of America, Elected Fellow (2011)
• American Association for the History of Medicine (life member)
• Middle East Medievalists (life member, from 2023)

Recent Publications

1. The Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic through the Eyes of Ibn Battuta, an online course module for the History for the 21^st Century (H21) Project (due for release in Summer 2024)
2. “Did the Black Death Birth ‘Race’? The Impact of Belich’s The World the Plague Made,” submitted 03 Feb 2024 for a special issue of Digital Philology
3. “An Omni-Crisis at the Intersection of Disciplines: Teaching the Black Death to STEM and Humanities Students,” submitted 12 Jan 2024 to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching(SMART)
4. Jacob Steere-Williams, Christos Lynteris, and Monica H. Green, “Epidemic Origins and Geographies of Blame in the Time of COVID-19,” forthcoming in COVID Studies: New Directions in Social Science Disaster Research, ed. Alexa Dietrich, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Rodrigo Ugarte
5. “The Pandemic Arc: Expanded Narratives in the History of Global Health,”  Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science (forthcoming); draft from 29 Jun 2023 posted on Humanities Commons: https://doi.org/10.17613/hsvs-sa63.
6. “In and Beyond the Beneventan Zone: The Transformation of Latin Medicine in the Eleventh Century,” to appear in: Brill Companion to the Beneventan Zone, ed. Andrew J. Irving and Richard Gyug (submitted May 2021, accepted Sept 2022)
7. “Plague (Yersinia pestis),” Encyclopedia of the History of Science, general ed. Christopher J. Phillips (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service), forthcoming
8. “When Feminism Isn’t Enough,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 57, no. 2 (2022), 191-197, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol57/iss2/10/.
9. “A New Definition of the Black Death: Genetic Findings and Historical Interpretations,” De Medio Aevo 11, no. 2 (2022), 139-55. Open access. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/dmae.83788 
10. “Putting Asia on the Black Death Map,” The Medieval Globe 8, no. 1 (2022), 59-87. Open access: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/306/article/867629
11. Robert Hymes and Monica H. Green, edited by Carol Symes, The Medieval Globe 8, no. 1 (2022), special issue on New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia. Open access: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48929, repr. as New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2022), ISBN 9781802701012
12. “Out of the East (or North or South): A Response to Philip Slavin,” Past and Present, 256, no. 1 (August 2022), 283-323
13. “When Feminism Isn’t Enough,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 57, no. 2 (2022), 191-197
14. “On Learning How to Teach the Black Death: COVID Edition,” posted for free access on Academia.edu, 19 December 2021, https://www.academia.edu/65148743/Green_On_Learning_How_to_Teach_the_Black_Death_COVID_Edition_2021_
15. with Nahyan Fancy (1^st author), “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258),” Medical History 65, no. 2 (April 2021), 157-177. Open access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/medical-history/article/plague-and-the-fall-of-baghdad-1258/C0E179EB4890C10BBFAE5C11DFC8DF36.
16. “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains,” online only
17. “Medicine in France and England in the Long Twelfth Century: Inheritors and Creators of European Medicine,” in: France et Angleterre: manuscrits médiévaux entre 700 et 1200, ed. Charlotte Denoël and Francesco Siri, Bibliologia 57 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 363-388
18. “What Places Ebola in the Realm of the ‘Global’? A View from History,” in The Shapes of Epidemics and Global Disease, ed. Andrea Patterson and Ian Read (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), pp. 328-362
19. Joris Roosen and Monica H. Green, “The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19 – Bibliography,” 26 May 2020, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w80dd0iZJs5qQRwyXyfzq41BiZBWFrGRQURz9rTyDXM/edit (this is continually updated)
20. “Emerging Diseases, Re-emerging Histories,” Centaurus 62, no. 2 (2020), 238-251, part of a “Spotlight” issue, Histories of Epidemics in the Time of COVID-19, ed. Erica Charters and Koen Vermeir, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/16000498/2020/62/2
21. with Lori Jones, “The Evolution and Spread of Major Human Diseases in the Indian Ocean World,” in Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Eva-Marie Knoll, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 25-57
22. “Recovering ‘Ancient’ Gynaecology: The Humanist Rediscovery of the Eleventh-Century Gynaecological Corpus,” in Transmission of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Outi Merisalo, Miika Kuha, and Susanna Niiranen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 45-54
23. “Gloriosissimus Galienus: Galen and Galenic Writings in the 11th- and 12th-Century Latin West,” in: Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen, ed. Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser, Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception, 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 319-342
24. “Putting Africa on the Black Death Map: Narratives from Genetics and History,” Afriques 9 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125
25. “Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.6
26. “Black as Death” [essay review of Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition (2016)], Inference: International Review of Science 4, no. 1 (2018), http://inference-review.com/article/black-as-death, ISSN 2576-4403
27. “Richard de Fournival and the Reconfiguration of Learned Medicine in the Mid-13th Century,” in Richard de Fournival et les sciences au XIIIe siècle, ed. Joëlle Ducos and Christopher Lucken, Micrologus Library, 88 (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018), pp. 179-206
28. with Helen King, “On the Misuses of Medical History,” The Lancet 391 (7 April 2018), 1354-55
29. “On Learning How to Teach the Black Death,” HPS&ST Note, March 2018, pp. 7-33, https://www.hpsst.com/uploads/6/2/9/3/62931075/2018march.pdf
30. “The Globalisations of Disease,” in Human Dispersal and Species Movement: From Prehistory to the Present, ed. Nicole Boivin, Rémy Crassard, and Michael D. Petraglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 494-520, ISBN 9781107164147
31. “The Black Death and Ebola: On the Value of Comparison,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica H. Green, TMG Occasional Publications 1 (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc Medieval Press, 2015), pp. ix-xx
32. “Genetics as a Historicist Discipline: A New Player in Disease History,” Perspectives on History 52, no. 9 (December 2014), 30-31, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2014/genetics-as-a-historicist-discipline
33. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica H. Green, TMG Occasional Publications 1 (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc Medieval Press, 2015), ISBN 978-1-942401-00-1
34. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ISBN-13: 978-0-19-921149-4
35. The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ISBN 978-0-8122-3589-0

Media Coverage

consulted for pieces in The Economist, NPR, Associated Press, Science, Hyperallergic, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, NPR, Potsdamer Neueste Nachtrichten. Most recent public notice of research: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/did-black-dea

Social Media

@monicaMedHist.bsky.social

Country Focus

Europe, Eurasia, Africa, global

Expertise by Geography

Africa, Asia, Middle East, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval, Pre-17th century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Medicine, Pedagogy, Science, Women