Keywords:Jewish-Christian relations Medieval women Health care Decoration of the body Gynaecology Female authority a b s t r a c tIn this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.
This article presents a brief analysis of the ways in which women’s healthcare was understood by medieval Jews, as well as how this sphere of medical activity was learned, practised and disseminated among western Jewish communities during the Middle Ages. It examines the paths of transmission and reception of theories and notions of female physiology, health and disease within the Hebrew medical corpus, and it analyses the influence of the Arabic and Latin traditions in this process. In connection with the understanding of women’s healthcare, it pays some attention to adornment and decoration of the body, as part of the technology that focused on intervening in the functioning of the body. It also discusses succinctly the process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews.
Summary
In this article, I analyse the attribution of remedies and therapeutic procedures to women, anonymous in the main, embedded in a number of texts belonging to the medieval Hebrew corpus of literature on women’s healthcare. By suggesting a classification of the ways in which both women and their healing activities are referred to, I intend to offer a framework that helps to identify Jewish (and non-Jewish) women’s health agency from medical texts. In addition to textual analysis, I compare some of the mentions with evidences found in a variety of historical and literary sources for the sake of helping to contextualise them.
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