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In this collection of seven major essays (one of them published here for the first time), Monica Green argues that a history of women's healthcare in medieval western Europe has not yet been written because it cannot yet be written - the vast majority of texts relating to women's healthcare have never been edited or studied. Using the insights of women's history and gender studies, Green shows how historians need to peel off the layers of unfounded assumption and stereotype that have characterized the little work that has been done on medieval women's healthcare. Seen in their original contexts, medieval gynecological texts raise questions of women's activity as healthcare providers and recipients, as well as questions of how the sexual division of labor, literacy, and professionalization functioned in the production and use of medical knowledge on the female body. An appendix lists all known medieval gynecological texts in Latin and the western European vernacular languages.
In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.
Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.
Essays on the practical aspects of medieval European medicine.
Learn about how medicine was practiced long ago.
An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.
Using an innovative approach to evidence for the medieval hospital and medical practice, this collection of essays presents new research by leading international scholars in creating a holistic look at the hospital as an environment within a social and intellectual context. The research presented creates insights into practice, medicines, administration, foundation, regulation, patronage, theory, and spirituality. Looking at differing models of hospital administration between 13th century France and Spain, social context is explored. Seen from the perspective of the history of Knights of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and Order of the Temple, hospital and practice have a different emphasis. Extant medieval hospitals at Tonnerre and Winchester become the basis for exploring form and function in relation to health theory (spiritual and non-spiritual) as well as the influence of patronage and social context. In the case of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, this line of argument is taken further to demonstrate aspects of the building based on a concept of epidemiology. Evidence for the practice of medicine presented in these essays comes from a variety of sources and approaches such as remedy books, medical texts, recorded practice, and by making parallels with folk medicine. Archaeological evidence indicates both religious and non religious medical intervention while skeletal remains reveal both pathology and evidence of treatment.
A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God’s embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God’s incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world—its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves—as a locus for divine encounter. Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world’s re-creation—their notion of the world’s re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God’s presence and promise of salvation.