Main description:

This 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.

Contents:

Introduction
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 Cabre and Fernando Salmon

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