Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps by Jennifer Borland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps by Jennifer Borland Winston Black Jennifer Borland. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. xv + 219 pp., 85 color and black and white illustrations. $114.95. ISBN: 978-0271090597. Like many teachers of the history of medicine, I have resorted to online searches for "medieval medicine" or "medieval health" to find engaging images for my slides and handouts. One of the most common results of these searches is a historiated initial V showing a bloodletting procedure in action: a barber-surgeon is incising a vein on the inner arm of a rosy-cheeked man, who looks away as his blood flows out into a bowl. This image comes from British Library Sloane MS 2435, the oldest copy of the popular health-care manual Régime du corps (hereafter Rdc), attributed to Aldobrandino of Siena, personal physician to Countess Beatrice of Savoy. Written in French around 1256, the Rdc is noteworthy as an early example of the vernacularization of learned medicine in later medieval European society. Seventy-five medieval copies of Rdc survive, of which twenty-three are illustrated with various depictions of medical treatments, copulation, breastfeeding, drunkenness, clothing, and food. Not surprisingly, many of these illustrations have been reproduced widely to educate, amuse, and titillate modern audiences, but rarely with any documentation or contextualization, leaving students and untrained professors to assume that such illustrations are typical of medieval medical thought and health practices. [End Page 160] Art historian Jennifer Borland seeks to remedy these oversights by exploring the meaning, purpose, and inspirations for the illuminations in manuscripts of Rdc in her book Visualizing Household Health. Central to her argument is that an analysis of gender is essential for understanding the Rdc and its illustrated copies, for many of the historiated initials show women as the agents of health care and bearers of medical knowledge in elite households. To support this argument, Borland focuses on a core group of seven deluxe manuscripts of Rdc that include historiated initials at the start of most chapters (from 37 to 147 in total). These historiated initials might seem shocking to modern audiences, as they share the format, appearance, and luxury of initials in contemporary Bibles and literary manuscripts but are used to depict earthy and even crude subjects such as cheese making and vomiting. But it is exactly this "juxtaposition of mundane topics and ostentatious manuscript design" that makes these elite copies of the Rdc fascinating subjects for research (123). This is not, however, a book about the text of Rdc; Borland rarely quotes from the text and remains dependent on the conclusions of Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin in their 1911 edition and study of the work. However, because she refers several times to the prologue of the Rdc in her arguments, it would have been helpful to include a translation of that text (only a few pages in length) as one of her appendices. Borland provides a detailed analysis of the provenance and codicology of her seven core manuscripts. She divides them logically into an earlier and a later group (three manuscripts from ca. 1265–1350 and four from ca. 1450–1500), based on changes in the illustration program and in the potential audience, from royal patrons to the wealthy bourgeoisie. Other manuscripts include illustrated frontispieces or single illuminated initials, but she does not address these, as one of her guiding concerns is to explore the narrative and educational role of the longer series of historiated initials in the deluxe manuscripts. These illustrated copies provided medieval owners and still provide modern scholars a window onto an idealized domestic environment, where birth and childcare, food and clothing, the bodies of nobility and servants, and all facets of household management were governed by a simple yet comprehensive health regimen, or régime du corps. Although many scholars have studied these initials individually and used them as evidence for medical [End Page 161] ideas and procedures in the later Middle Ages, nobody until Borland has studied the initials in sequence and as a...