This book is dedicated to the memories of Robert Branham, my professor at Bates College, whose teaching, scholarship, and humanity continue to inspire and sustain me, and to my grandma, Dorothy Grosser, whose beauty, spirit, and love are with me all the time. I would also like to thank Leighton Pierce, Franklin Miller, Michael McGee, Lauren Rabinowitz, Doris Witt, Camille Seaman, and Bruce Gronbeck at the University of Iowa for their wisdom, guidance, generosity, and support. I am especially grateful to Barbara Biesecker, my teacher, colleague, and friend, who offered perceptive comments on the manuscript and unfailing encouragement. My appreciation also goes out to the University of Iowa Graduate College, which assisted me with the award of a Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship. At Syracuse University, I am indebted to Jane Marsching, Doug Dubois, Mark Durant, Jude Lewis, John Orentlicher, Loren Schwerd, and Owen Shapiro for their art, friendship, and constructive advice. Additional thanks go to John Sloop, and Catherine Murphy, Lisa Wigutoff, and Myia Williams at Westview Press.

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. Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Your old, destructive lifestyle is fading into the past and now you are a woman in recovery. What an amazing gift you’ve given yourself. So why aren’t you happier? As sobriety takes hold and your head starts to clear, a wide range of emotions can begin to emerge—feelings that until now you’ve “medicated” with chemicals. Yet to stay sober, and to grow and flourish as a person, you must engage in healing and take responsibility for these long-neglected emotions. Beverly Conyers, a prominent voice in recovery, uses personal stories and informed insight to guide you in achieving emotional sobriety by addressing behaviors and feelings unique to the female experience. Learn how to develop the inner resiliency to face and process difficult, buried emotions—such as shame, grief, fear, and anger—while freeing the positive feelings of self- worth, independence, and integrity. Discover how to heal your “damaged self” by improving your communication skills, expanding your capacity for intimacy and trust, and reawakening a spiritual life. As you heal your wounded heart, you can free yourself to a life of self-acceptance and lay the foundation for a rewarding and relapse-free second stage of recovery.

This collection of essays focuses on how women born before the nineteenth century have claimed a place in history and how they have been represented in the collective memory from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Reham ElMorally draws upon Sylvia Walby’s Six Structures of Patriarchy, tailored for the Egyptian context, to dissect how this patriarchal construct has historically suppressed and exploited women.

Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.