An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

Barren Women is the first scholarly book to explore the ramifications of being infertile in the medieval Arab-Islamic world. Through an examination of legal texts, medical treatises, and works of religious preaching, Sara Verskin illuminates how attitudes toward mixed-gender interactions; legal theories pertaining to marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and scientific theories of reproduction contoured the intellectual and social landscape infertile women had to navigate. In so doing, she highlights underappreciated vulnerabilities and opportunities for women’s autonomy within the system of Islamic family law, and explores the diverse marketplace of medical ideas in the medieval world and the perceived connection between women’s health practices and religious heterodoxy. Featuring copious translations of primary sources and minimal theoretical jargon, Barren Women provides a multidimensional perspective on the experience of infertility, while also enhancing our understanding of institutions and modes of thought which played significant roles in shaping women’s lives more broadly. This monograph has been awarded the annual BRAIS – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

Gender in Medieval Culture provides a detailed examination of medieval society's views on both gender and sexuality, and shows how they are inextricably linked. Sex roles were clearly defined in the medieval world although there were exceptions to the rules, and this book examines both the commonplace world view and the exceptions to it. The volume looks not only at the social and economic considerations of gender but also the religious and legal implications, arguing that both ecclesiastical and secular laws governed behaviour. The book covers key topics, including femininity and masculinity and how medieval society constructed these terms; sexuality and sex; transgressive sexualities such as homosexuality, adultery and chastity; and the gendered body of Christ, including the idea of Jesus as mother and affective spirituality. Using a clear chapter structure for easy navigation and categorisation, as well as a glossary of terms, the book will be a vital resource for students of medieval history.

This book examines how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in cultural assumptions about gender.

Medicine and religion were intertwined in the middle ages; here are studies of specific instances. The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies. The book reflects the extraordinary advances which 'pure' history of medicine has made in the last twenty years: there is medicine at the levels of midwife and village practitioner, the sweep of the learned Greek and Latin tradition of over a millennium; there is control of midwifery by the priest, therapy through liturgy, medicine as an expression of religious life for heretics, medicine invading theologians' discussion of earthly paradise; and so on. Professor PETER BILLER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York; Dr JOSEPH ZIEGLER teaches in the Department of History at the University of Haifa.Contributors JOSEPH ZIEGLER, PEREGRINE HORDEN, KATHRYNTAGLIA, JESSALYN BIRD, PETER BILLER, DANIELLE JACQUART, MICHAEL McVAUGH, MAAIKE VAN DER LUGT, WILLIAM COURTENAY, VIVIAN NUTTON.

This path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250 to 1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources -- vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects -- to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multilinguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.

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