Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture ed. by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (review)

An English mystic in her revelations rejoices in the blood streaming from Christ’s wounded body that threatens to make her own bed and sickroom a veritable bloodbath; a Flemish lady, threatened by her parents with marriage, cuts off her own nose; a Hungarian princess immediately on receiving the religious habit founds a hospital where she herself serves as a humble caregiver for the sick men there; female inmates in mixed leprosariain northern France get pregnant and are permanently expelled from such quasi-monastic institutions: in all four cases their own bodies, or bodily functions and images, are a platform to express religious devotion, approaching a spiritual union with God, or proving or disproving their commitment to chastity. These are only a partial selection of vignettes from this collection of eleven essays (elegantly introduced by the editor and seamed together in an afterword by Denis Renevey) on the religion–medicine nexus from c. 1100 to c. 1500, with special reference to gender and emphasis on medieval English literary sources and intellectual contexts. The collection is a welcome contribution to our growing library, highlighting the pivotal role of bodily medicine, disease, disability, physicians, care and cure, and the body in general, in promoting both real and metaphorical transumptions to the spiritual and in creating crucial opportunities for spiritual contemplation. Medical and spiritual knowledge is seen to form a hybrid, occasionally blurring boundaries between physical and spiritual ailments and healing. At a time when female medicine was increasingly becoming masculine, a gendered filtering of such texts is particularly welcome, adding important nuances to this common view.

The two opening essays on the idea of Mary the Physician( Maria Medica), who practices medicine alongside her more widely recognized role as intercessory healer and her natural association with childbirth, highlight the female as healer in hagiographical/mystical and secular traditions of medieval English women (particularly The Life of Christina of Markyate, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the letters of the Paston women [Dianne Watt] and Geoffrey Chaucer [Roberta Magnani]). Such use of the concept, Watt claims, was closely linked to and validated the role of women as healers in society. Regarding Chaucer’s Doctour of Phisik’s Tale, Magnani maintains that the author queries the dominance of male-clerical authority, presenting Mary as an alternative form of incarnated authority assuming an equal healing or salvific potency in relation to the Trinity.

Three essays show the peculiar emphasis female mystics placed on metaphors of physical and spiritual illness. Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa unfolds the layers of medical allusions (particularly those related to the cult of the Sacred Heart) in the revelations of Mechtild of Hackerborn, translated in the fifteenth century into Middle English, and the delicate interplay of Eucharistic symbolism, popular piety, and the discourse of medicine. Liz Herbert McAvoy reviews the development of anchoritic medical discourse (in the revelations of Julian of Norwich especially) and the “medicinal” role of penance and contemplation in anchoritic life, regulating the spiritual health of the anchorite and the prescribed cure for Christians’ spiritual ills. Deeply familiar with the religious, mystical, and literary traditions of narrating visions and revelation, Juliette Vuille describes Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe ecstatically encountering the divine—conceiving, presenting, and transmitting their visions and mental condition as perfectly sane “divine,” “heavenly,” or “holy insanity.” This became a source of authority and expertise in their community, to judge expertly whether a mystical vision came from God or the devil (performing a discretio spirituum), and help and teach others similarly affected. Vuille highlights the limits and fallacies of a simplistic psychological and psychiatric (hence ahistorical) analysis of such religious behavior, often pathologized and labeled a form of lobe epilepsy, hallucinations, hysteria, neurosis, Tourette’s syndrome, or other mental disorders, with little sensitivity to the larger context of the medieval sources.

Two essays concern the cultural force of medical tropology in...