Nicole Archambeau

I take an integrative approach to the history of healing in the later Middle Ages. I put learned medicine and the sufferer's experience in the context of larger political events and the social fabric of daily life.

My first book, Souls under Siege: Stories of Plague, War, and Confession in 14th-Century Provence explores a pious Mediterranean community adapting to the dangers of mercenary warfare and plague. In witness testimonies from the canonization inquest for Delphine de Puimichel, the sacrament of penance also emerges as a unique moment of potential healing and profound anxiety.