“Performing Healing. Ritual, Gesture, and Therapy in the Ancient World” is an International Conference organized by the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens. It will take place on January 15-16, 2027.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, healing was never a purely technical or private act. Across different historical periods and cultural settings, whether enacted in healing sanctuaries, domestic environments, or by itinerant medical practitioners, therapeutic intervention unfolded within complex systems of embodied practices, ritualized behaviours, and socially embedded gestures. Patients slept, prayed, sang, exposed their bodies, narrated their dreams and displayed cures; physicians touched, cut, bound, anointed and prescribed in ways that simultaneously mobilized medical knowledge, ritual expertise, and social authority. Gods—above all Asklepios, and later Christian saints—were not abstract belief-figures but operational agents whose presence, epiphany, and efficacy were activated, mediated, and documented through material and performative means.
This conference shall attempt to reconsider ancient healing not primarily as a system of beliefs or a corpus of medical doctrines, but as a performative and knowledge-producing regime: a constellation of embodied, spatially situated, and publicly legible practices through which illness, care, and recovery were negotiated over the long term. Adopting a thematic and diachronic perspective, the conference explores healing as a dynamic interface between bodies, spaces, gestures, and narratives. By bringing together archaeology, epigraphy, history of medicine, performance studies and anthropology of the body, the conference aims to explore how healing was enacted through gesture, voice, movement, architecture and ritual choreography.
Particular attention will be paid to:
-medical and ritual gestures (touch, incision, binding, offering);
-the performative dimension of therapeutic practices;
-the staging and mediation of divine presence and epiphany in healing contexts;
-the role of space and architecture in shaping therapeutic experience and perception;
-the visibility of healing knowledge through inscriptions, votives and narrative displays.
We understand therapeutic practices as the result of the entanglement of ritual activities and religious beliefs, medical discourses and practices, broadly perceived, and performative acts. In a few words, therapy operated as a form of enacted knowledge, where bodies, gods and practitioners co-produced cure through performance.
Suggested thematic panels
- Enacting the Cure: Gesture, Touch and Medical Performance
This panel addresses the embodied dimensions of healing practices across periods and contexts, focusing on gesture, touch, and sensory interaction as vectors of medical knowledge and authority. Contributions may explore surgery, pharmacology, therapeutic touch, and the performative construction of professional expertise.
- Ritual and Performance in healing processes
This panel explores healing as a ritual process enacted in sacred spaces, especially in healing sanctuaries and related cultic contexts. Topics may include incubation, paeans and hymns, votive practices, ritual choreography, and the role of patients as performers within therapeutic scripts.
- Staging the Divine: Space, Visibility and the Architecture of Therapy
This panel examines how healing and divine agency were spatially organized, mediated, and made visible through architecture, inscriptions, votive assemblages, and landscape design. Contributions may focus on therapeutic spaces as stages for epiphany, validation of cure, and the public negotiation of efficacy.
We invite proposals on topics including:
-Gesture, touch and the body in ancient medicine
-Healing rituals and performative practices
-Healing sanctuaries and therapeutic environments
-Incubation, dreams and modes of divine communication
-Paeans, hymns and vocal performance in healing contexts
-Votive practices and narratives of cure
-Architecture, space and therapeutic experience
-Epiphany and the visibility of divine agency
Submission guidelines
Please submit:
- an abstract of max. 300 words
- a short bio (max. 150 words)
to: [email protected] (Luigi Lafasciano)
Deadline: September 30, 2026
Selected speakers will be notified by: October 31, 2026
Organizing committee: Luigi Lafasciano, Christy Constantakopoulou, Nikolaos Papazarkadas (Institute of Historical Studies / National Hellenic Research Foundation)
