Category Archives: Religion

Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa

By Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

"The Mount of the Good Shepherd," c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.
“The Mount of the Good Shepherd,” c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.

In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices. This contribution situates “sound recipes” within the logic of the pharmacopeia, according to which a rāga (a melodic framework in Indian classical music associated with specific moods and times) or mantra (a sacred verbal formula believed to have spiritual or healing power) can be dosed, timed, and combined with other substances, such as herbal infusions, perfumed oils, or mineral pastes, much like a drug.[1] Musicological studies on early modern South Asia, roughly spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have linked rāga, time, and rasa (the aesthetic mood or emotional essence evoked in performance) to somatic and emotional states.[2] Building on this insight, this contribution triangulates close readings of three sources: first, Sanskrit medical and musical sources in which mantra, nāda (primordial or resonant sound), and rāga act as therapeutic agents, (e.g., Bhaiṣajya Ratnāvalī and Saṅgīta Parijāta); second, missionary letters and reports from Goa that frame healing as a site of translation; and third, early modern European recipe books in which prayer and chant appear beside simples.

Goa as a contact zone

On the western Indian coast, sixteenth-century Portuguese physicians such as Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa catalogued Indian materia medica while operating inside a Catholic imperial world.[3] Their dialogues show how Portuguese medicine negotiated local drugs, practices, and authority. Jesuit letters and mission histories from the same context present healing as a privileged site of cultural brokerage. Missionaries learned and sometimes used local therapeutics, staging cures that blended prayer, relics, and vernacular ideas of efficacy.[4] While the Jesuit archive highlights Christian ritual sound, it also attends to Indian bodily techniques and substances, suggesting that mantra-like repetition and Latin prayer were mutually legible within a shared recipe logic. In Jesuit infirmaries and domestic chapels, healing often unfolded as a multisensory practice: prayers were murmured over decoctions, oils were stirred in rhythm with chants, and Latin invocations blended with Sanskrit syllables. The result was a working grammar of healing in which utterance and dose reinforced each other. The ladle, mortar, and pestle set the rhythm, and the voice kept time. What emerged was not a confused hybrid but a practical recipe culture that judged efficacy by repeatable acts, including speech.

Jesuit correspondence from the Estado da Índia — the Portuguese imperial territories in the Indian Ocean, with Goa as their administrative and missionary center — consistently treated healing as a tool of persuasion. Medical care, herbal knowledge, and ritual sound became the means through which missionaries sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Christian devotion and attract converts. The letters sketch a choreography of roles: a lay brother to measure and infuse, a scholar to recite orisons over the sick, and a converted nurse to translate for patients and procure medical ingredients at the market. Prayer did not cancel the dose; it stabilized it. In practice, for example while cooking, repeated Pater Nosters or litanies functioned like a timer, dictating the duration of the simmer, the cooling, and the interval between spoonfuls.[5]

Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies catalogued Indian drugs and the social settings in which they were obtained. Merchants and physicians visited the houses of the sick, kitchen workers were consulted, and patients received decoctions that tasted of cinnamon and clove as much as of missionary hospitality. Orta weighed local testimony, sometimes admitting to a plant’s healing power while omitting information about the ritual words that accompanied its use. His description of Goa’s medical life reads less like a study than a domestic pharmacy staffed by servants and informants who knew that recipes often traveled with words, prayers, and spells attached to them.[6] Cristóvão da Costa’s printed Compendium extended Orta’s list of drugs and diagrams. Its path from Goa’s kitchens to Europe’s presses shows how a cure that began with a whispered invocation could be reduced to a chemical extract or powdered preparation — stripped of its ritual and sonic dimensions —     even as prayer in Goa’s Jesuit college continued to time the stirring of medicines in the infirmary.[7]

Music as medicine

The Jesuits also worked with an acoustic theory of cure. Relics, blessings, and the sign of the cross functioned as spoken technologies. In Goa, missionaries recognized that Indian patients already understood the logic of a spoken remedy. Atharvavedic and Ayurvedic pairings of plant and verse were not exotic outliers but familiar structures with different words. And so, in the mission kitchen, Latin did not replace mantra in the act of dosing so much as stand alongside it . A Konkani-speaking patient might not understand the words or meanings of Latin words but could recognize the pattern: an uttered formula, a breath, and the spoon. Jesuit chroniclers marked successful cures with the language of grace, while local interlocutors could interpret the same cure as the right plant, rightly cooked, with a voice that prepared the body to receive it.[8]

These spaces of missionary healing also served as spaces of translation. At the cauldron, a Jesuit brother preparing remedies learned to name plants as his patients did, adopting local terms and pronunciations so that recipes and treatments could circulate across languages and communities.. He learned timings shaped by coastal winds, monsoon humidity, and fasting calendars. He learned that certain decoctions were best taken at dawn, when the body’s heat and the day’s rāga aligned. Even if the mission did not adopt Indian musicology, it absorbed its clock. The schedule of matins and vespers met local dosing of mornings and evenings. In the Goan kitchen, college bells doubled as timers. The clang that called the community to prayer also told the cook when to lift the pot.[9]

European household  medicine and recipe culture had already prepared missionaries to accept words as curative adjuncts. Early modern recipe books placed psalms and charms beside simples without discomfort. A charm to staunch blood might sit next to a syrup for coughs. The value of these entries lay not in abstract theory but in the report that they had proven efficacy. When Jesuits in Goa encountered Indian sound medicine, they carried this idea with them. It allowed them to absorb counts of recitation or the tying of a thread while a verse was spoken. In the Goan mission kitchen, such actions could be recoded as Christian piety without altering the rhythm the patient’s body was used to feeling.[10] Yet the kitchen could also be erased. When cures moved from the voice-filled room to printed missionary accounts or natural histories, the words were often flattened. Efficacy was attributed to the drug alone, and the context of sound was treated as superstition or allowed to fade.
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Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Literature at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. At SMVDU, he teaches courses on applied linguistics and stylistics. His recent work has focused on folk songs, folks tales, and Hindi proverbs.

NOTES

[1] Schofield, K. B. (2023). Music and musicians in late Mughal India. Cambridge University Press. https://assets.cambridge.org/97813165/17857/excerpt/9781316517857_excerpt.pdf;  Jairazbhoy, N. A. (1971). The rags of North Indian music: Their structure and evolution. Lok Virsa Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725

[2] Rowell, L. (1992). Music and musical thought in early India. University of Chicago Press; Kaufmann, W. (1968). The ragas of North India. Indiana University Press. Open Library

[3] Orta, G. de. (1563/1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (C. Markham, Trans.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org; da Costa, C. (1578/1582). Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales. Internet Archive. https://archive.org

[4] Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed mission: Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India. Oxford University Press; Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1948–1988). Documenta Indica (Vols. 1–18). Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. HathiTrust Digital Library

[5] Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–366.

[6] Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1913), ix–xii, 65–72.

[7] Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos: Martín de Victoria, 1578), 1–10, 145–150.

[8] Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–20.

[9] Josef Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. III, 1553–1557 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 45–47, 112–118.

[10] Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–12, 95–108.

Bread and Resistance in Colonial Bengal

By Mohd. Ahmar Alvi

Among the many foods accompanying British colonizers to India, leavened bread was received differently by different communities and religious groups. Many upper-caste Hindus had revulsion not only for the bread but also for the other items coming out of bakeries introduced to the Indian culinary scene by the British. Meanwhile, Dalits –who had been marginalized by the Brahmins first by not being given jobs and second by being denied food eaten by the higher castes— accrued these bakeries as an opportunity to liberate themselves from unpaid, indentured, menial jobs, but also to ensure economic security and dignity. Muslims, a religious minority, also perceived these bakeries as a prospective source of earnings owing to their longstanding and auspicious connections to baking skills, inherited from the Mughals during their rule in past centuries.  

The aversion exhibited by upper-caste Hindus was predicated on a set of strong Brahmanical religious beliefs. In Hinduism, food can carry a plethora of diktats. It dictates your job, your social status, whether you are ‘pure’ or ‘polluted’, and whether you are entitled to enter a temple or not. The food one eats becomes the defining factor of one’s caste. One such way that upper-caste Hindus distinguish themselves from the lower ones is by denying the food touched or cooked by the lower castes. A high-caste Hindu can only accept food or drink from a person of a similar rank. If the food is prepared or touched by a lower caste person, it must be rejected.[i] Therefore, to accept bread coming from Dalits’ hands would be polluting and profaning to savarnas (caste Hindus). 

However, bhadralok (the educated ‘enlightened’ Bengali middle-class), under the strong influence of Brahmo Samaj [ii], used the consumption of bread as a means to record their resistance against casteism and to defy the taboo about crossing the seas to the West. A sizeable amount of literature—both fictional and autobiographical—written in Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries documents this resistance.

Rajnarayan Basu, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

For example, in his 1909 autobiography, Atmacharit (Autobiography), Rajnarayan Basu (1826-1899), a famous Brahmo[iii] leader, narrates how during his college days he often consumed bread and biscuits coming from the hands of Dalits as an emblem of progress and to mobilize resistance against casteism. When he accepted Brahmosim, he consumed bread to record his protest against casteism, because, at that time, Bengal bakeries were operated by Dalits or Muslims. He remembers his Brahmo oath-taking ceremony as:

On the day when I signed the oath (at the beginning of 1846) and received Brahmoism, I was accompanied by a couple of other adults from my village. That day, we celebrated our new religion with bread and sherry. This was to show that we did not believe in distinctions of caste or creed.[iv]

 

Bipin Chandra Pal, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Likewise, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932), in his autobiography, Sattar Bastar (Seventy Years), tells us how by consuming bread, albeit secretly, he along with his peers broke away from the shackles of casteism:

Though we would come out of the shop after buying flour of one paisa and holding it in our hands to show to the people. We would bring hot bread and biscuits inside our shirt pockets or inside our dhotis, and at the night, after our guardians slept, we would bring these out and have those. In this way, even while staying at Sylhet, my binding considerations of religion and caste were internally totally broken.[v]

 

Madhusudan Dutt, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In his satirical play, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyata (That’s What Civilization is all About), Madhusudhan Dutt (1824-1873) dramatizes the response of the middle-class Bengali youth toward the consumption of bread baked by Dalits. In the play, a Vaishnava[vi] man observes some youths to learn their activities. Kali, one of the youths, suggests feeding Vaishnava fowl cutlet with bread so that his life becomes meaningful.[vii] In the nineteenth century, Vaishnavas did not consume any meat or an item prepared by a lower-caste Hindu, so this represented a particularly powerful moment of resistance.

Swami Vivekananda, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Among critics, the diminishing potential of scriptural reasoning and advancing modernity in colonial Bengal meant that some detractors couched their criticism against the consumption of bread in the language of science. In 1899, Swami Vivekananda, in his essay, The East and the West, strongly opposed the consumption of bread. According to him, flour mixed with yeast became injurious to health, and he approved of the consumption of only toasted bread under special circumstances:

And as for fermented bread, it is also poison, don’t touch it at all. Flour mixed with yeast becomes injurious. Never take any fermented thing; in this respect, the prohibition in our shastras of partaking of any such article of food is a fact of great importance.[viii]

In this way, the consumption of bread was not only about sustenance, but reflected broader debates and relationships between communities and religious groups. People’s varied responses to bread thus suggest the power of food in resisting casteism in Colonial Bengal.

 

[i] For a detailed study on food and Hinduism see Pamela G. Kittler and Kathryn P. Sucher, Food and Culture. 5th ([Sydney]: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004).

[ii] This community played an important role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India between 1820 and 1930. It brought about a social reformation by extending full equality to Dalits, women, and laborers, among other marginalized groups. Its members are regarded as the pioneers of liberal political consciousness and Indian nationalism. 

[iii] A believer and practitioner of the principles of Brahmo Samaj.

[iv] Rajnarayan Basu,  Atmacharit (Calcutta: Chiraya Prakasan, 1909): 44.

[v] Bipin Chandra Pal, Sattar Bastar (Calcutta: Patralakha, 1954): 92-93.

[vi] Follower of the Hindu god Vishnu and his incarnations.

[vii] Madhusudhan Dutt, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyata (Calcutta: Tuli Kalam, 1860): 247.

[viii] Swami Vivekananda, “The East and the West”, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Almora: Advaita Ashram, 1954): 390-91.

Sickness Personified: Clandestine Remedies from Colonial Yucatán

By R.A. Kashanipour


I curse you, little seizures! Whose erupting pox are you? Eruptions on the head and body, open eruptions, internal eruptions, fiery eruptions…” [1] So begins a highly ritualized remedy for fever, eruptions, and seizures from late colonial Yucatán. As I noted in my last post, sickness and disease were endemic throughout colonial Latin America and brought together distinct traditions of healing. As this remedy and the dozens of others from the manuscript known as Ritual of the Bacabs show, eighteenth-century Mayas of the Yucatán were not silent victims of disease. Instead, they understood sickness and infirmity as extensions of the natural and human world. They incorporated ancient traditions and firmly rooted healing in colonial context. And, as I would like to note in this post, healers personified and naturalized diseases to bolster their own therapeutic powers.

Before returning to this remedy, I want to touch on the manuscript source and then briefly make note of ancient traditions of Maya healing. Ritual of the Bacabs is a collection of healing incantations, prayers, and remedies written in Yucatec Maya sometime in the eighteenth century. This unique work, which today is held at Princeton University, addresses afflictions common to the colonial world, including pox (kak), difficulty breathing (coc), and difficulty walking (chibal oc). The devastating affects of disease are often noted as seizures (tancas). Several cures associate these outbursts with their origins, such as walking seizures (ah oc tancas), while others ascribe direct ties to the natural world as their sources, including macaw-jaguar seizures (mo balam tancas) and tarantula seizures (chiuoh tancas). The culturally bound ailment often described as madness (coil) regularly appears associated with extreme cases of the pox and seizures.

On the whole, the remedies of the text illustrate the ongoing revision of long-standing Maya traditions in the face of colonial institutions. In particular, in the pre-Hispanic period, infirmity and remediation were associated with the supernatural world and directly tied to the deities Ix Chel and Itzamná. In 1571, Diego de Landa, the second Bishop of Yucatán and infamous crusader against pagan practices, noted Ix Chel’s centrality to healing.

“The physicians and the sorcerers assembled in one of their houses with their wives… they opened bundles of their medicine, in which they kept many little things… little idols of the goddess of medicine, whom they called Ix Chel .”

Diego de Landa, ca. 1570

The two deities, the goddess of the moon and lord of the sun, were bound as husband and wife and mirroring elements of health and sickness.

Ix Chel and Itzamna This rollout image from a classic period pot depicts the goddess Ix Chel (center) caring for an ailing Itzamná (right) and a female healer (left) performing a healing ritual.  The leaves surround the infirmed and bedridden Itzamná most likely represent the purgatives used to induce the deer to vomit. A vulture appears underneath the old god’s bed, just to make clear that his condition is dire.  © Justin Kerr, K2794, www.mayavase.com
Ix Chel and Itzamna
This rollout image from a classic period pot depicts the goddess Ix Chel (center) caring for an ailing Itzamná (right) and a female healer (left) performing a healing ritual. The leaves surround the infirmed and bedridden Itzamná most likely represent the purgatives used to induce the deer to vomit. A vulture appears underneath the old god’s bed, just to make clear that his condition is dire. © Justin Kerr, K2794, www.mayavase.com

During the colonial period, local Church authorities attempted to root out any expressed association with ancient religions. In healing, however, it is clear they were unsuccessful. These deities, who were central to the creation mythology of the Classical Maya, were represented as powerful animistic forces in the healing text. In a remedy for a breathing affliction in Ritual of the Bacabs, both Itzamna and Ix Chel are invoked to harness the use of the powerful cardinal directions. The enchanter is to “for four days, shake the face of the red Ix Chel, the white Ix Chel, the yellow Ix Chel; four days he shakes the face of the red Itzamna.” [3] These supernatural forces figure prominently in the background of numerous remedies. They serve to root the cures in line with ancient traditions, which endured well into the colonial period.

File:Goddess O Ixchel.jpg
Ix Chel with her Rabbit
In this image from a Classic period earthenware polychome vase, a seated Ix Chel appears with her rabbit, which is often identified as one of her animal spirit companions. She appears as a young woman, dressed in the regalia of a noble, complete with headdress. The original object is housed at Museum of Fine Arts Boston and available digitally here.

The remedies of Ritual of the Bacabs represent a clandestine system of ritualized healing that directly built on past Maya practices, such as the invocation of Ix Chel. As a text designed for alienating and eliminating sickness, the curanderos that penned the work most likely identified themselves as a special Maya class of healers known as mak ik or benevolent shamans that controlled healing winds. In this way, they stood in line with ancient traditions, but were fully immersed in colonial experience.

[1] Ritual of the Bacabs, Princeton University Library, Garrett-Gates Collection, Mesoamerican Manuscript No. 1, folio 100.

[2] Diego de Landa and Alfred M. Tozzer, Landa’s Relación De Las Cosas De Yucatan: A Translation. (New York: Kraus, 1966), 154.

[3] Ritual of the Bacabs, folio 65.

A Black Rooster and the Angel of Dread: Jewish Magical Recipes Against Fear

By Andrea Gondos

Illness and a desperate longing for wellness and healing defined Jewish magical recipes books, written in a thriving manuscript culture of practical Kabbalah that existed alongside printed works in Jewish communities of East-Central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[i] These manuscripts, many of them cherished by their compilers, played an important role in recording, accumulating, and subsequently transmitting knowledge about the natural and the supernatural worlds. As recipe compilations, they include lists of ingredients that are accompanied by detailed instructions directed at a practical goal, which in this case aimed to improve a person’s material and spiritual wellbeing. The writers of these amulets were collectively called ba’alei shem[ii] or masters of the (divine) name who deployed experiential types of knowledge in combination with traditions of angelic and divine names. These expose a holistic outlook based on the careful alignment and calibration of three interrelated spheres of human existence: the religious, derived from prayer and proper conduct; artisanal knowledge of the natural world, the unique qualities of herbs, plants, and animal substances; and the mastery of supernatural forces and processes by wielding power over demons, forces of impurity, and astrological influences.  The acquisition of this unique type of expertise, enumerated in these magical recipe books, bequeathed upon its master extraordinary powers and charisma. Here, I will survey three visually interesting amulets designed to counteract demonic forces that were believed to cause negative mental and emotional states such as fear.

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel, MS 38 3279, fol. 109v: an amulet against fear for a child.

 

“[An] amulet for a child gripped by terror. It should be hung on the child and her/his name should be written on it; he can also hang on the child the foot of a black rooster.”

A curious ingredient and technique presented in this recipe is the use of charaktêres, or angelic alphabet, that was meant to directly command and address specific angelic interlocutors to produce a desired outcome.[iii] Defined as “an alphabetic sign or a simple ideogram which does not belong to any of the alphabets used in that specific magical text, or to any known system of meaningful symbols,”[iv] charaktêres constituted a form of linguistic magic and were frequently deployed through cross-cultural borrowing and adaptation in a variety of cultural settings, including Judaism, from Antiquity to modern times.

Another recipe that addresses fear was supposed to be written on parchment made from a kosher animal, one that was considered in compliance with Jewish dietary laws. Here the visual element is the formation of a square from the angelic name PAHAD’EL, which is a composite of the words ‘fear’ (pahad) and God (‘El). At the upper corners of the recipe, on the left and right sides, two additional angelic names are indicated: Hasadi’el (left), and Rahami’el (right). Both names are cognates of mercy, thus visually these two merciful angels flank the Angel of Dread (Pahad’el) overpowering and diminishing its negative effect on the person, who is gripped by fear. When confronted by the debilitating effects of mental distress, such as fear or dread, the Jewish shaman thus had recourse to a cache of magical modalities to affect healing. Ingredients here are comprised of a magic square, letter mysticism, alongside theoretical elements of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, which invokes the mystical principle of containment. Accordingly, the demonic powers of the left side of the divinity need to be included, encompassed, and subsumed in the right, the sacred aspect of God. Kabbalistic theosophy places great emphasis on the idea of tricks and ruse to co-opt the dark forces of the left, instead of confronting them directly; this conceptualization is visually demarcated in the diagrammatic features of this recipe formula.

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel. MS 8 1070, fol. 31r

 

In the final recipe for fear, food and plant substances, bread and garlic, are promoted as effective therapeutic ingredients to overcome this negative emotional state. This particular compilation does not contain any distinctly Jewish elements. Rather, it draws on more common cross-cultural practices, which are adopted and offered as part of a ba’alei shem’s stock of natural remedies:

“For one who goes out at night so he would not fear evil spirits even in a place of danger: He should take a loaf of bread in his right hand and in his left hand some garlic, and no harm will come to him, God willing, who saves and protects.”

Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel. MS 8 1070, fol. 11v

 

The above recipes which were offered as panacea against fear, a form of mental distress, highlight the multiplicity of approaches that ba’alei shem in East-Central Europe took to alleviate the debilitating grip of negative states of the mind. While some recipes display theoretical, particularistic, and more elite forms of knowledge, other variants for the same illness exhibit a more universal, folkloristic, and popular stance.

 

[i] See Agata Paluch, “Practical Kabbalah and Practical Knowledge: Kabbalistic Manuals and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” History of Knowledge, April 11, 2019, https://historyofknowledge.net/2019/04/11/practical-kabbalah-and-practical-knowledge-kabbalistic-manuals-and-natural-knowledge-in-early-modern-east-central-europe/.

[ii] On ba’alei shem, see Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Master of an Evil Name: Hillel Ba’al Shem and His Sefer ḥa-Heshek,”AJS Review 28.2 (2004): 217–248; and Immanuel Etkes. The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, translated by Saadya Sternberg (Hanover and London: Brandeis University, 2005).

[iii] Gideon Bohak, “The Charaktêres in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Magic,” Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis, 47 (2011): 25-44.

[iv] Ibid., p. 25.

 

 


About

Andrea Gondos’s scholarship has focused on knowledge organization and transmission reflected in early modern study guides in the field of Kabbalah. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the DFG-Emmy Noether Research Group “Patterns of Knowledge Circulation” at the Institute of Jewish Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she examines the conceptualization of the female body, gender, and reproductive health as expressed by Jewish male healers in early modern manuscripts of magic in East-Central Europe.