Description
Book SynopsisExamines several illustrated copies of the late medieval health guide known as the Régime du corps, demonstrating how the manuscripts’ depictions of household care highlight female-dominated expertise within the domestic sphere.
Trade Review“Jennifer Borland has done a great service in teaching medievalists from several different fields how to ‘read’ these sequences of historiated initials and how to interpret them as both constructions and constructors of later medieval ideas about bodies, health, and social status.”
—Winston Black Manuscript Studies
“Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ is a valuable contribution to the study of medieval medicine, deluxe manuscripts, and elite domesticity. Its in-depth interpretations of some of the Régime’s historiated initials stand out as especially noteworthy.”
—Julie Orlemanski caa.reviews
“Borland masterfully weaves together the methodologies of a variety of disciplines: the history of women as patrons and consumers, the history of medicine, anthropology, geography, and of course material and visual studies and art history, all under the larger umbrellas of social history and medieval studies. . . . By immersing the illuminated Régime manuscripts in this multivalent exploration, the full nature of their rich content is finally revealed.”
—Tracy Chapman Hamilton,author of Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260–1321)
“Visualizing Household Health interrogates the function and value of illumination paired with a secular text with both practical and theoretical knowledge. . . . Borland demonstrates the newest area of modern scholarly attention to the wayfinding devices that integrated the textual and visual communication of medieval knowledge.”
—Jean A. Givens,author of Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art
“Visualizing Household Health includes the academic apparatus to support further study of the Régime, while also serving as a welcome and timely interpretative exploration of the illumination, reception, and context of these fascinating manuscripts.”
—Anne Rudloff Stanton Speculum
