Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange TOME-funded Monographs Open Access Books & Monographs 2021 Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health Sara Ritchey University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_tome 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 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Open Access Books & Monographs at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in TOME-funded Monographs by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ACTS OF CARE ACTS OF CARE Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health Sara Ritchey CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University 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. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress. cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ritchey, Sara Margaret, author. Title: Acts of care : recovering women in late Medieval health / Sara Ritchey. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022417 (print) | LCCN 2020022418 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753534 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501758324 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501753541 (epub) | ISBN 9781501753558 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Women healers, Medieval—Benelux countries. | Medical care—Religious aspects— Christianity. | Medical care—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC R141 .R563 2021 (print) | LCC R141 (ebook) | DDC 610.9/02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022417 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022418 Cover image: Louise Bourgeois, Pregnant Woman, 2009. Archival dyes printed on stitched cloth, 24-3/8 × 20-1/2 in.; 61.9 × 52.1 cm. Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. To my parents, Margaret Maraist Ritchey and Ronald Ritchey Contents List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: To Heed the Trace 1 Part I. Therapeutic Narratives 1. Translating Care: The Circulation of Healing Stories 37 2. Bedside Comforts: The Social Organization of Care 77 Part II. Therapeutic Knowledge 3. Empirical Bodies: Competing Theories of Therapeutic Authority 131 Part III. Therapeutic Practice 4. Rhythmic Medicine: The Psalter as a Therapeutic Technology in Beguine Communities 173 5. Salutary Words: Saints’ Lives as Efficacious Texts in Cistercian Women’s Abbeys 224 Afterword 258 Bibliography 265 Index 299 Abbreviations AASS Acta sanctorum , edited by Jean Bolland et al., 68 vols. (Paris: Palmé, 1863–1925) BHL Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis , 2 vols. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1949) VAS [Vita] de B. Aleyde Scharembekana VAV Vita Arnulfi conversi Villariensis VBJ Vita Beatae Juettae reclusae VBN Vita Beatricis, priorisse in Nazareth VCM Vita Christinae mirabilis VIC Vita Ioannis Cantipratensis VILeau Vita Idae Lewensis VILeuv Vita Idae Lovaniensis VIN Vita Idae de Nivellis VJM Vita Iulianae de Corelion VLA Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis VMO Vita Mariae Oigniacensis VMY Vita Margarete de Ypres VOL Vita B. Odiliae Viduae Leodiensis ix Acknowledgments This book seeks to make visible the hidden labor that enabled late medieval European communities to survive and thrive. The author could not have endured its coming into being but for the quiet care acts of so many friends, family members, colleagues, and service workers. I compose these final words from the security of my home during a national lockdown undertaken to limit the spread of the virus known as COVID-19. My writing is thus made possible, as it always was, by service and care laborers who daily risk their own well-being so that others can enjoy the privileges of comfort and connection. Let us sustain the visibility of their labor, and recognize and value it as essential, long after our collective re-emergence. Throughout the period of this book’s research and writing, my colleagues and students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have been a source of intellectual generation and soli- darity when public support for higher education in the humanities has often devalued our work. Under the leadership of Amy Elias and with the support of Ernie Freeberg, the Humanities Center and the Department of History at the University of Tennessee enabled me to participate in a monthly seminar on the medical humanities that led to many productive insights; they also hosted a workshop of the complete manuscript in which Montserrat Cabré, Susan Lawrence, Jay Rubenstein, and Laura Smoller offered extensive feed- back. I am grateful for their perspectives and criticisms, but especially for their friendship. Other chapters or portions of this book have benefited from workshops and talks hosted by various universities and institutions, where a great deal of the organizational labor for my visit was undertaken by graduate students; I thank them for their time and intellectual energy, especially Eliza- beth Harper, Mark Lambert, Jacqueline Victor, Anna Weerasinghe, and Sarah Zanolini. My colleagues at the University of Tennessee and the University of Louisiana have become dear friends and have greatly enhanced this project by sharing work and citations, offering feedback, and lifting my spirits. Thank you especially to Ian Beamish, Monica Black, Kristen Block, Manuela Ceballos, xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Emily Deal, Nikki Eggers, Rich Frankel, Katie Hodges-Kluck, Chad Parker, Liz Skilton, Tina Shepardson, Lena Suk, Alison Vacca, and Shellen Wu. Other friends and scholars have also answered persistent questions, helped me to acquire resources, invited me to share work, and generally cared for my emotional life; I am especially grateful to Paul Barrette, Winston Black, Jennifer N. Brown, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Adam Davis, Daisy Delogu, Jay Diehl, Jen Edwards, Nahyan Fancy, Peggy McCracken, Cathy Mooney, Amy Ogden, Lucy Pick, Jeff Rider, Alan Rutenberg, and Sharon Strocchia. Their patience and kindness, so rare in this field, have allowed me to find a place in medieval studies when once my presence seemed so uncertain. The amount of support and guidance these scholars imparted should have resulted in a more perfect book; its remaining flaws are very much my own. I remain perpetually grateful to and awed by three women in particu- lar. Monica Green has fundamentally transformed not only my scholarship and career, but that of multiple generations of scholars. In addition to her constant supply of resources and feedback, her efforts to create online and in-person pedagogical and mentoring communities are absolutely unprec- edented, such as the MEDMED-L list and the NEH seminar on Health and Disease in the Middle Ages. Without her scholarly generosity, advocacy, and intellectual labor, I simply could not have written this book. Alison Frazier and Martha Newman were my first and most dedicated mentors, making space for me in an academy into which I did not at once comfortably fit, and introducing me to hagiographic sources. Their meticulous scholarship, care- ful mentoring, and community building is a gift to our field. Words do not adequately capture my gratitude for the work of these three scholars, but my actions, I hope, can recapitulate their generous support by welcoming into the field and providing navigational assistance to those who are finding their way. In the midst of writing this book, I transitioned to an R1 university and to geographic proximity to the institutional resources and scholarly communi- ties positioned along the eastern seaboard of the United States. That move has brought into sharp relief the cumulative effects on scholars and schol- arship of the unequal distribution of our resources and networks among academic geographies of prestige. I wish to acknowledge that much of this book could not have been completed from the margins of those institutional hierarchies, and I pledge to continue the work of building an inclusive acad- emy in which resources are shared more equitably. Such exclusions muffle multitudes of voices, the grand polyphonic harmonies of medieval studies. I also wish to recognize the intellectual and emotional labor of scholars of color in our field, some of whom are involved in the professional collec- tives known as Medievalists of Color and RaceB4Race. They are doing the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii constant and uncompensated work of lifting the veil that has for so long attempted to conceal the foundational and structural racism, misogyny, and institutional