Carmen
Caballero Navas
Research Topic
Seder Nashim. The Role of Sections on Women’s Conditions in Shaping the Medieval Hebrew Corpus of Gynecology
Bio
Carmen Caballero Navas is an associate professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of Granada. Her research focuses primarily on the medieval Hebrew textual production on women’s healthcare, with an emphasis on women as recipients and providers of medical care. She also explores other interconnected topics, including Jewish debates on sexual difference and the construction of meanings for the female body, medicine among medieval Jews of southern Europe, and Jewish knowledge and practice of magic.
Her Ph.D. dissertation received the Koret Jewish Studies Publications Program Award. Prior to that, she spent one year as a graduate student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and subsequently several years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. She was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (OCHJS) in 2022.
Selected publications
- The Book of Women’s Love and Jewish Medieval Medical Literature on Women. Sefer Ahavat Nashim (Kegan Paul Ltd., 2004).
- “Virtuous and Wise: Apprehending Female Medical Practice from Hebrew Texts on Women’s Health Care,” Social History of Medicine 32.4 (2019): 691–711 (Special cluster: Learning Practice from Texts: Jews and Medicine in the Later Middle Ages, ed. N. Cohen-Hanegbi).
- “She Will Give Birth Immediately: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Medieval Hebrew Medical Texts Produced in the Mediterranean West,” Dynamis 34.2 (2014): 377–401.
