Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa 
Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture [PDF ebook] 

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 Mc Avoy, Irina Metzler, Denis Renevey, Patricia Skinner, Juliette Vuille, Diane Watt, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa.

قائمة المحتويات

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 Mc Avoy

‘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

Select Bibliography

عن المؤلف

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.