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Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. 2 (2005), 1-46. Abstract: This long essay review summarizes work in the field... more

Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. 2 (2005), 1-46.

Abstract: This long essay review summarizes work in the field of History of Medicine as it relates to topics on women and gender in the medieval world—mostly focusing on western Europe but bringing in some comparative work. It supplements and expands upon two earlier reviews of the field that I did in 1989 and 1993. Topics include:
(1) a review of edited texts (where I argue that “we have perhaps reached the point of critical mass, where enough work has been done to identify both the major continuities and the major novelties in the textual traditions of women’s medicine”);
(2) “technologies of the body,” a term I have coined to refer to “a group of techniques, beliefs, and practices focused on intervening in the functioning of the body (including, but not limited to, the alleviation of pain)” and which I propose as a definition wider than “medicine” to capture the focus on cosmetics, promotion of fertility (rather than contraceptives), and even andrology in many medieval texts on women’s medicine;
(3) sex differences as they were understood in medieval medical literature, which challenge Laqueur’s idea of a “one-sex body,” including beliefs in male menstruation, the emphasis on “provoking the menses” in texts on women’s medicine, and the impact of the “new Aristotle” starting in the 13th century, especially new interest in the nature of generation;
(4) women as medical agents, a concept I develop here to circumvent the limiting vocabulary of medical professionalization and encompass women’s various engagements with healthcare, including as readers of medical texts and recipes, the lack of evidence for professionalized midwives before the 14th cent.;
(5) childbirth as a female space, where I contest the assumption that childbirth was exclusively a female concern and show instead that there are a variety of ways pregnancy, childbirth, and wetnursing can be analyzed as gendered phenomena; and
(6) future directions, where I explore topics and methodologies that might yet prove valuable.
The essay draws on medical anthropology both for conceptual analyses of the workings of gender, but also (via ethnographies) as a source of comparative material.

This review is 3rd in a series of 4 essays I have done reviewing literature on women, gender, and medicine in the medieval period. The others are:

Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73; reprinted in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78; reprinted again in Monica H. Green, with corrigenda in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS680 (Aldershot, 2000).

Monica H. Green, “Recent Work on Women’s Medicine in Medieval Europe,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 21 (1993), 132–41.

Monica H. Green, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,” Gender and History, Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue, 20, no. 3 (November 2008), 487-518; reprinted in Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 43-82.

See also, for comprehensive bibliography up through 2009: Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009,” an 82-page cumulative annotated bibliography of over 375 items of European and North American scholarship published in the past 30 years, posted for free access on Sciencia.cat, http://www.sciencia.cat/english/libraryenglish/publicationssc.htm, posted 02 March 2010.