Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250–1550

Abstract

In the afterword to this volume, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi describes this book as about “women’s health and women’s roles in healthcare” in the late Middle Ages and early modernity (316). Substantial recent research, including books and articles by editors Ritchey and Strocchia, has enhanced our understanding of both subjects. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how a wide historical gaze and careful contextual analysis of texts and images can better position the healing of women and women healers as central concerns in the history of medicine.The volume presents a series of case studies with overlapping interests and distinct methodologies, styles, and presentations. The geography of the chapters spans much of continental Europe and even includes two essays focused on the medieval Islamic world and the early Ottoman Empire. The opening section engages with religious healing—calling our attention to how religious rituals performed by women were part of the apparatus of healing. The next section contains four chapters, three of which focus on Italian subjects, to examine how medical knowledge was produced and transmitted through texts. The third grouping of chapters, which foregrounds care for the ill, shares considerable thematic ground with the first two chapters about religious healing. The final section of the book approaches issues of reproduction. The volume begins with a broad introduction and concludes with an afterword pointing to directions for future research.The subjects of women’s health and women caregivers, which too often have been absent from historical writing, require interdisciplinary analysis, and women as practitioners have often been obscured in the historical record. Methodologically, these chapters can be divided into two groups beyond the subject headings that structure the volume, according to whether their argument is primarily (1) textual or (2) contextual. The primarily textual essays identify the textual sources of women’s health and healing and explain how they fit into the late medieval and early modern intellectual landscape. This is not to say that these textually grounded chapters lack context. On the contrary, their strength often lies in how their authors draw out details about social and cultural milieus by examining the transformation of texts as they crossed cultural, social, geographical, and temporal terrain.The primarily contextual essays are exercises in looking obliquely at snippets of text, reading silence, and arriving at informed historical inference from a deep understanding of the social, cultural, intellectual, and (less often) economic contexts that surround a particular reference, document, or practice. The challenge in this worthy enterprise is providing compelling evidence to non-specialist readers who do not share the authors’ own deep expertise. In a few instances, the authors did not sufficiently equip readers with the breadth of understanding that this kind of argument demands.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? Experiences of health and healing have always been gendered, albeit in ways that are fundamentally unstable and change over time. This volume is another push to treat gender in the history of medicine as a central analytical category rather than a niche interest.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. The Italian recipes for breast care, early Ottoman instructions for therapeutic baths, images from German surgery manuals, and excerpts from gynecological treatises in the medieval Islamic world will add texture and nuance to our portrayals of health and healing in past societies. I, for one, will never again teach Latin translations of Ibn Sina without the historiated initial depicting him holding a disembodied breast at the start of the section “de mamilla.”