International Health Humanities Network Membership

Helen Hickey completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne, Australia, on representations of the Everyday in the medieval poetry and bureaucratic writing of Thomas Hoccleve. Her work focussed on medieval English and French literature and history of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century.

She has conducted research on madness in medieval literature, which has been complemented by historical work on lunacy and idiocy inquisitions extant in the English Rolls. A forthcoming article on 'Thomas Hoccleve and the Inquisitions of Insanity' will appear in the edited collection, Theorizing Legal Personhood (edited by A. Boboc and K. Kennedy; Brill).

Her approach to transhistorical health is literary / historical and language-based. She is interested in the intersection (and disjunction) between authoritative medical science and the discursive resources available to individuals and societies in a specific time-place to frame and understand the spectrum of ill-health.