Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250–1550 ed. by Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia (review)

This collection of eleven essays, edited by Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia, has its origins in a workshop organized by Eva-Maria Cersovsky and Ursula Grießmann, "Gender(ed) Histories of Health, Healing, and the Body, 1250–1550," at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Cologne in January 2018. Following the editors' lengthy introduction, the essays are presented in four thematic groupings: "sources of religious healing," "producing and transmitting medical knowledge," "infirmity and care," and "(in)fertility and reproduction." Contributions cohere around the volume's overarching aim: to challenge our present understanding of the cultural, social, and political history of medicine, health, and the body. The afterword by Naama Cohen-Hanegbi underscores the productivity of this approach. Not only do the essays expand the kind of documentation typically under consideration in medico-historical studies, but also they actively interrogate the definition of medicine itself, alongside incisively analyzing the interactions of various modes of care.

The collection's focus is broad, with chapters discussing material from 1250 to 1550. In this way, the editors foreground the importance of the longue durée when approaching premodern medical history. That situates the readers in the context of the emergence of professional medicine and the vernacularization of medical discourse. Contributions discuss both sides of the equation, considering experts and amateurs, learned discourses and intuitive practices alike. As such, the collection reveals the ways in which experiences shifted over the period and highlights the role of embodied knowledge in gendered medical praxis. Taking gender as their principal heuristic allows contributors to show that women were in positions typically deemed "nonprofessional" as they were based on the "bodywork" of caregiving, allowing the reader to discover the lived experience of healthcare. Such analyses respond to, and develop, essential work in feminist scholarship from the 1990s onwards on the gender politics of care work. Collectively, the essays belong to the broader global turn in medieval studies: they show the overlap among multiple cultures, languages, and religions. Zones of contact between Western Europe and the Ottoman and Islamic worlds in the premodern era come into ever clearer focus.

The volume's innovations are threefold. New kinds of documentation and new spaces of care are considered in detail, with gender utilized as the primary analytical lens, offering a "new" paradigm for the field. For this reason, the collection represents cutting-edge research, and a rich resource for readers.

Some essays, for example, present in translation relevant yet heretofore neglected material, making them that much more accessible to readers. Chapters offering such material focus variously on masculine discourses on the female body (Cabré and Salmón, Verskin, Cohen-Hanegbi), household balneotherapy in a fifteenth-century pharmaceutical encyclopedia (Atat), and the contact between Latin and Islamicate medical cultures, as revealed in treatises (Rider). Three chapters consider the relationship between vernacular and formal medical discourse in depth. Tuten interrogates the composition of simple medical recipes, whilst Martins analyses the translation of medical treatises for vernacular audiences with publication of cheap "book of secrets." Barker and Strocchia's examination of Caterina Sforza's recipe collection written in the sixteenth century generates fresh insights into the experience of female practitioners. Similarly, the collection breaks new ground in its consideration of documents that are rarely, if ever, consulted in terms of medical history, yet are nevertheless crucial sources of information. These include, for instance, religious and personal texts, such as psalters and sermons (Ritchey), literary sources, such as hagiographic texts and miracle tales (Kandzha), legal documents, such as practical manuals for market inspectors (Verskin), vernacular medical documents, including recipe books (Barker and Strocchia, Tuten), practical administrative sources, such as hospital statutes and monastic inventories, and material artifacts, or a comparative approach (Cersovsky, Nolte).

Existing scholarship overwhelmingly situates, and thus studies, medicine in its most traditional settings: the university, the academy, and the guild. Essays in this volume open up...