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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Ritchey, Sara,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (330 p.) :; 11 b&w halftones, 1 map

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.

Table of 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