Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250—1550

     This 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. The collection provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in Later Medieval and Renaissance societies.

Table of contents

Acknowledgment

Abbreviations

Introduction. Gendering Medieval Health and Healing: New Sources, New Perspectives

Part I. Sources of Religious Healing

1. Caring by the Hours: The Psalter as a Gendered Healthcare Technology

2. Female Saints as Agents of Female Healing: Gendered Practices and Patronage in the Cult of St. Cunigunde

Part II. Producing and Transmitting Medical Knowledge

3. Blood, Milk, and Breastbleeding: The Humoral Economy of Women's Bodies in Medieval Medicine

4. Care of the Breast in the Late Middle Ages: The Tractatus de passionihus mamillarum

5. Household Medicine for a Renaissance Court: Caterina Sforza's Ricettario Reconsidered

6. Understanding/Controlling the Female Body in Ten Recipes: Print and the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge about Women in the Early Sixteenth Century

Part III. Infirmity and Care

7. Ubi non est mulier, ingemiscit egens? Gendered Perceptions of Care from the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries

8. Domestic Care in the Sixteenth Century: Expectations, Experiences, and Practices from a Gendered Perspective

9. Bathtubs as a Healing Approach in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Medicine

Part IV. (In)fertility and Reproduction

10. Gender, Old Age, and the Infertile Body in Medieval Medicine

11. Gender Segregation and the Possibility of Arabo-Galenic Gynecological Practice in the Medieval Islamic World

Afterword: Healing Women and Women Healers

Contributors

Index

List of figures and tables