Dr. Brendan Röder

I am a historian of the early modern period with a particular interest in the history of the body, medicine and gender, the history of religion, sensory history and urban history. Geographically, my work has focused on the Catholic world and the Holy Roman Empire. In my first book The Priest’s Body. Disability in the early modern Catholic Church (Frankfurt/New York 2021, in German) I trace concepts and practices surrounding so-called bodily defects in the early modern Catholic clergy. The book analyses the construction of body-related norms as well as the cases of hundreds of individuals having to cope with legal and social problems relating to their body.
I am currently working on several projects: A book project entitled Sensing Danger. Vigilant Citizens in Early Modern Augsburg explores how urban dwellers of the past used their senses to detect dangers and how they put their perceptive capacities into the service of collective and private agendas. Focusing on examples from public health, fire safety, crime control and food security it combines the history of urban politics and environments with sensory history and the history of attention. Recently, I have been devising a new project on Medical Missions in East Africa from 1500-1800 which aims to reconstruct the medical encounters between Europeans and African populations before the advent of 19th century medical missions and colonial and tropical medicine. An article on Franciscan missionaries around 1700 appeared in the Social History of Medicine (see here). Since 2023, I am also a PI - together with medical historian Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio - of the project "The Hidden, Suspicious, Changeable Sex. Shame and Vigilance in the Early Modern Period" on the history of genitalia in medical discourse and legal practice within the Research Cluster "Cultures of Vigilance" (more).