Items related to Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health

Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health - Softcover

Ritchey, Sara

 
9781501758324: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501758322 ISBN 13: 9781501758324
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

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About the Author

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

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Publication date
2021
Language
English
ISBN 10 
1501758322
ISBN 13 
9781501758324
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
330