Description
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.
(from https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501753534/)
Chapters:
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
ISBN
9781501753534 ; 1501753541
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Cornell University Press
City
Ithaca, NY
Recommended Citation
Ritchey, Sara, "Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health" (2021). TOME-funded Monographs. 2.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_tome/2
Comments
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more at the TOME website, available at www.openmonographs.org.
This work can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes: Acts of Care is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.