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In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's health care 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 health care 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.

Medical care --- Women healers, Medieval --- HISTORY / Medieval. --- History --- Religious aspects --- Christianity. --- , psalters, medieval medicine, Low Countries, hagiography, miracles. --- Beguines, Cistercians, medical charms. --- Medieval women healers --- Delivery of health care --- Delivery of medical care --- Health care --- Health care delivery --- Health services --- Healthcare --- Medical and health care industry --- Medical services --- Personal health services --- Public health

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A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices-including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance-reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God's embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God's incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world-its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves-as a locus for divine encounter.Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world's re-creation-their notion of the world's re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God's presence and promise of salvation.

Theology, Doctrinal --- Natural theology --- Spiritual life --- Nature --- Natural religion --- Theology, Natural --- Apologetics --- God --- Religion --- Religion and science --- Theology --- Philosophy of nature --- History --- History of doctrines --- Christianity --- Religious aspects --- Catholic Church

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This collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250-1550. 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 multi-linguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. The volume provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies

Medical care --- Women in medicine --- Medicine, Medieval --- History --- Delivery of health care --- Delivery of medical care --- Health care --- Health care delivery --- Health services --- Healthcare --- Medical and health care industry --- Medical services --- Personal health services --- Public health --- Medieval medicine --- Medicine --- Soins médicaux --- Femmes en médecine --- Médecine médiévale --- Medicine, Medieval. --- Histoire --- Sociology of the family. Sociology of sexuality --- Sociology of health --- History of human medicine --- anno 1200-1499 --- anno 1500-1599 --- Mediterranean countries --- Europe --- Disability. --- Gender. --- Health. --- Medicine. --- Religion. --- Women --- Middle Ages. --- Health attitudes --- Healing --- Health and hygiene --- Soins médicaux --- Femmes en médecine --- Médecine médiévale