Acts of Care : Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health / Sara Ritchey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ritchey, Sara, Author.

Contributor:

University of Tennesse-Knoxville, funder.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical care--History--To 1500.

Medical care.

Medical care--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Women healers, Medieval--Benelux countries.

Women healers, Medieval.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (330 p.) : 11 b&w halftones, 1 map

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2021]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's health care 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 health care 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Map

Introduction: To Heed the Trace

Part I. Therapeutic Narratives

1. Translating Care: The Circulation of Healing Stories

2. Bedside Comforts: The Social Organization of Care

Part II. Therapeutic Knowledge

3. Empirical Bodies: Competing Theories of Therapeutic Authority

Part III. Therapeutic Practice

4. Rhythmic Medicine: The Psalter as a Therapeutic Technology in Beguine Communities

5. Salutary Words: Saints' Lives as Efficacious Texts in Cistercian Women's Abbeys

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 21. Apr 2021)

ISBN:

1-5017-5355-X

OCLC:

1243310792

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access