Description
Book SynopsisThis path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250 to 1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources -- vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects -- to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multilinguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries.
Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.
Trade ReviewCo-winner of the 2020 Collaborative Project Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG)! The awards committee states that
Gender, Health and Healing 1250-1550 is exciting in conception and breadth, using "an integrative, hybrid model of analysis" that ranges far beyond "the narrow terrain of academic, text-based medicine" using new types of evidence about women's "acts of caring and curing."
"This well-structured volume offers many original elements and makes an important contribution to research on health and healing in the period under consideration, especially concerning the role of women in everyday household care. Its notable features are the broad range of sources examined and the translation of relevant passages from (often unpublished) medieval and early modern works. The internal coherence of the volume and its overall clarity make it also suitable for a non-specialist readership."
- Alessandra Foscati, KU Leuven, Leuven,
Early Science and Medicine 26 (2021)
"Taking us beyond the story of theoretical medicine, this volume significantly expands the source base to present a full portrait of what counted as medicine at this time. The eleven essays in this collection demonstrate clear and vivid links between women’s health care knowledge and healing practices and the lived experiences of pre-modern people, emphasizing both continuity and innovation in the centuries spanning the late medieval and Renaissance eras."
- Lori Woods, Saint Francis University,
Renaissance and Reformation 44.1 (Winter 2021)
"This outstanding volume of essays presents exciting new research on gender and health care in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. [...] As stated in their introduction, Strocchia and Ritchey particularly aim to bring new sources and new methodologies to light, in order to demonstrate ‘the sheer complexity of everyday caregiving and health maintenance’ (p. 16). The book is resoundingly successful in these goals, and it is particularly effective at illuminating the continual intersections and interplay between intellectual, social, and cultural spheres of health and healing."
- Alisha Rankin, Tufts University, USA,
Social History of Medicine, 2021
"The chapters raise a broader methodological question for historians, literary scholars, art historians, and scholars of religious studies: After excavating such stories, how can we alter our histories of women’s health and healing to make them the central subjects and characters that they clearly were? [...] In that vein, a number of the contributions in this volume contain transcriptions, translations, and reproductions of primary sources that will serve as important resources in our classrooms, where we must teach histories that are more inclusive and representative."
- Hannah Marcus, Harvard University,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 52, Number 1, Summer 2021
"The volume as a whole significantly advances our awareness of the variety, persistence, and pervasiveness of women’s contributions to the maintenance and restoration of health, as well as how their medical and caring roles were understood and represented."
- Sandra Cavallo,
Reviews in History, March 2021
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Gendering Medieval Health and Healing: New Sources, New Perspectives
Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia
PART 1: Sources of Religious Healing
Caring by the Hours: The Psalter as a Gendered Healthcare Technology
Sara Ritchey
Female Saints as Agents of Female Healing: Gendered Practices and Patronage in the Cult of St. Cunigunde
Iliana Kandzha
PART 2: Producing and Transmitting Medical Knowledge
Blood, Milk and Breastbleeding: The Humoral Economy of Women's Bodies in Late Medieval Medicine
Montserrat Cabré and Fernando Salmón
Care of the Breast in the Late Middle Ages: The Tractatus de Passionibus Mamillarum
Belle S. Tuten
Household Medicine for a Renaissance Court: Caterina Sforza's Ricettario Reconsidered
Sheila Barker and Sharon Strocchia
Understanding/Controlling the Female Body in Ten Recipes: Print and the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge about Women in the Early Sixteenth Century
Julia Gruman Martins
PART 3: Infirmity and Care
Ubi non est mulier, ingemiscit egens? Gendered Perceptions of Care from the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries
Eva-Maria Cersovsky
Domestic Care in the Sixteenth Century: Expectations, Experiences, and Practices from a Gendered Perspective
Cordula Nolte
Bathtubs as a Healing Approach in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Medicine
Ayman Yasin Atat
PART 4: (In)fertility and Reproduction
Gender, Old Age, and the Infertile Body in Medieval Medicine
Catherine Rider
Gender Segregation and the Possibility of Arabo-Galenic Gynecological Practice in the Medieval Islamic World
Sara Verskin
Afterword: Healing Women and Women Healers
Naama Cohen-Hanegbi
Index
