Acts of Care (eBook)

Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health

Sara Ritchey (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
330 Seiten
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
9781501753541 (ISBN)

Infos

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

Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Autor

Sara Ritchey is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of Holy Matter.

Inhalt

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

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.3.2021
• Zusatzinfo: 11 b&w halftones, 1 map
• Verlagsort: Ithaca
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Mittelalter
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
• Schlagworte: Beguines, Cistercians, medical charms,, psalters, medieval medicine, Low Countries, hagiography, miracles
• ISBN-13: 9781501753541 / 9781501753541