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

Current preoccupations with the body have led to a growing interest in the intersections between religion, literature and the history of medicine, and, more specifically, how they converge within a given culture. This collection of essays explores the ways in which aspects of medieval culture were predicated upon an interaction between medical and religious discourses, particularly those inflected by contemporary gendered ideologies. The essays interrogatethis convergence broadly in a number of different ways: textually, conceptually, historically, socially and culturally. They argue for an inextricable relationship between the physical and spiritual in accounts of health, illness and disability, and demonstrate how medical, religious and gender discourses were integrated in medieval culture.

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa is Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shizuoka University.

Contributors: Louise M. Bishop, Elma Brenner, Joy Hawkins, Roberta Magnani, Takami Matsuda, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Irina Metzler, Denis Renevey, Patricia Skinner, Juliette Vuille, Diane Watt, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa.
1120894730
Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture
An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

Current preoccupations with the body have led to a growing interest in the intersections between religion, literature and the history of medicine, and, more specifically, how they converge within a given culture. This collection of essays explores the ways in which aspects of medieval culture were predicated upon an interaction between medical and religious discourses, particularly those inflected by contemporary gendered ideologies. The essays interrogatethis convergence broadly in a number of different ways: textually, conceptually, historically, socially and culturally. They argue for an inextricable relationship between the physical and spiritual in accounts of health, illness and disability, and demonstrate how medical, religious and gender discourses were integrated in medieval culture.

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa is Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shizuoka University.

Contributors: Louise M. Bishop, Elma Brenner, Joy Hawkins, Roberta Magnani, Takami Matsuda, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Irina Metzler, Denis Renevey, Patricia Skinner, Juliette Vuille, Diane Watt, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa.
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Overview

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

Current preoccupations with the body have led to a growing interest in the intersections between religion, literature and the history of medicine, and, more specifically, how they converge within a given culture. This collection of essays explores the ways in which aspects of medieval culture were predicated upon an interaction between medical and religious discourses, particularly those inflected by contemporary gendered ideologies. The essays interrogatethis convergence broadly in a number of different ways: textually, conceptually, historically, socially and culturally. They argue for an inextricable relationship between the physical and spiritual in accounts of health, illness and disability, and demonstrate how medical, religious and gender discourses were integrated in medieval culture.

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa is Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shizuoka University.

Contributors: Louise M. Bishop, Elma Brenner, Joy Hawkins, Roberta Magnani, Takami Matsuda, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Irina Metzler, Denis Renevey, Patricia Skinner, Juliette Vuille, Diane Watt, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781843844013
Publisher: BOYDELL & BREWER INC
Publication date: 07/16/2015
Series: ISSN , #11
Pages: 310
Product dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA is Professor Emerita of Medieval English Literature at Shizuoka University, and Research Fellow at the Center for Medieval English Literary Text Studies, Meiji University, Japan.

Professor Diane Watt is Head of the School of English and Languages, University of Surrey. Secretaries of God won the 1998 Foster Watson Memorial Gift.

JULIETTE VUILLE is a Lecturer in Old and Middle English at the University of Lausanne.

LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY FLSW is Professor Emerita of Medieval Literature at Swansea Universityand Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol.

NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA is Professor Emerita of Medieval English Literature at Shizuoka University, and Research Fellow at the Center for Medieval English Literary Text Studies, Meiji University, Japan.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Naoe Kutika Yoshikawa
Mary the Physician: Women, Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages - Diane Watt
Chaucer's Physicians: Raising Questions of Authority - Roberta Magnani
Heavenly Vision and Psychosomatic Healing: Medical Discourse in Mechtild of Hackeborn's the Booke of Gostlye Grace - Naoe Kutika Yoshikawa
Bathing in Blood: The Medicinal Cures of Anchoritic Devotion - Liz Herbert McAvoy
"Maybe I'm Crazy?" Diagnosis and Contextualisation of Medieval Female Mystics - Juliette Vuille
Purgatory and Spiritual Healing in John Audelay's Poems - Takami Matsuda
Reginald Pecock's Reading Heart and the Health of Body and Soul - Louise M Bishop
Disabled Children: Birth Defects, Causality and Guilt - Irina Metzler
Marking the Face, Curing the Soul? Reading the Disfigurement of Women in the Later Middle Ages - Patricia Skinner
Did Drunkenness Dim the Sight? Medieval Understandings and Responses to Blindness in Medical and Religious Discourse - Joy Hawkins
Between Palliative Care and Curing the Soul: Medical and Religious Responses to Leprosy in France and England, c.1100-c.1500 - Elma Brenner
Afterword - Denis Renevey
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