Acts of Care

Front matter

LB

Acts of Care

Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health

Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: To Heed the Trace

Afterword

Tf

AASS

BHL

VAS VAV VBJ VBN VCM VIC VILeau VILeuv VIN VJM VLA VMO VMY VOL

ABBREVIATIONS

Acta sanctorum, edited by Jean Bolland et al., 68 vols. (Paris:

2 vols. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1949) [Vita] de B. Aleyde Scharembekana Vita Arnulfi conversi Villariensis Vita Beatae Juettae reclusae

Vita Beatricis, priorisse in Nazareth Vita Christinae mirabilis

Vita Ioannis Cantipratensis

Vita Idae Lewensis

Vita Idae Lovaniensis

Vita Idae de Nivellis

Vita Iulianae de Corelion

Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis

Vita Mariae Oigniacensis

Vita Margarete de Ypres

Vita B. Odiliae Viduae Leodiensis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book seeks to make visible the hidden labor that enabled late medieval European communities to survive and thrive. The author could not have endured its coming into being but for the quiet care acts of so many friends, family members, colleagues, and service workers. I compose these final words from the security of my home during a national lockdown undertaken to limit the spread of the virus known as COVID-19. My writing is thus made possible, as it always was, by service and care laborers who daily risk their own well-being so that others can enjoy the privileges of comfort and connection. Let us sustain the visibility of their labor, and recognize and value it as essential, long after our collective re-emergence.

Throughout the period of this book’s research and writing, my colleagues and students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have been a source of intellectual generation and solidarity when public support for higher education in the humanities has often devalued our work. Under the leadership of Amy Elias and with the support of Ernie Freeberg, the Humanities Center and the Department of History at the University of Tennessee enabled me to participate in a monthly seminar on the medical humanities that led to many productive insights; they also hosted a workshop of the complete manuscript in which Montserrat Cabré, Susan Lawrence, Jay Rubenstein, and Laura Smoller offered extensive feedback. I am grateful for their perspectives and criticisms, but especially for their friendship. Other chapters or portions of this book have benefited from workshops and talks hosted by various universities and institutions, where a great deal of the organizational labor for my visit was undertaken by graduate students; I thank them for their time and intellectual energy, especially Elizabeth Harper, Mark Lambert, Jacqueline Victor, Anna Weerasinghe, and Sarah Zanolini. My colleagues at the University of Tennessee and the University of Louisiana have become dear friends and have greatly enhanced this project by sharing work and citations, offering feedback, and lifting my spirits. Thank you especially to Ian Beamish, Monica Black, Kristen Block, Manuela Ceballos, xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Emily Deal, Nikki Eggers, Rich Frankel, Katie Hodges-Kluck, Chad Parker, Liz Skilton, Tina Shepardson, Lena Suk, Alison Vacca, and Shellen Wu. Other friends and scholars have also answered persistent questions, helped me to acquire resources, invited me to share work, and generally cared for my emotional life; I am especially grateful to Paul Barrette, Winston Black, Jennifer N. Brown, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi, Adam Davis, Daisy Delogu, Jay Diehl, Jen Edwards, Nahyan Fancy, Peggy McCracken, Cathy Mooney, Amy Ogden, Lucy Pick, Jeff Rider, Alan Rutenberg, and Sharon Strocchia. Their patience and kindness, so rare in this field, have allowed me to find a place in medieval studies when once my presence seemed so uncertain. The amount of support and guidance these scholars imparted should have resulted in a more perfect book; its remaining flaws are very much my own.

I remain perpetually grateful to and awed by three women in particular. Monica Green has fundamentally transformed not only my scholarship and career, but that of multiple generations of scholars. In addition to her constant supply of resources and feedback, her efforts to create online and in-person pedagogical and mentoring communities are absolutely unprecedented, such as the MEDMED-L list and the NEH seminar on Health and Disease in the Middle Ages. Without her scholarly generosity, advocacy, and intellectual labor, I simply could not have written this book. Alison Frazier and Martha Newman were my first and most dedicated mentors, making space for me in an academy into which I did not at once comfortably fit, and introducing me to hagiographic sources. Their meticulous scholarship, careful mentoring, and community building is a gift to our field. Words do not adequately capture my gratitude for the work of these three scholars, but my actions, I hope, can recapitulate their generous support by welcoming into the field and providing navigational assistance to those who are finding their way.

In the midst of writing this book, I transitioned to an R1 university and to geographic proximity to the institutional resources and scholarly communities positioned along the eastern seaboard of the United States. That move has brought into sharp relief the cumulative effects on scholars and scholarship of the unequal distribution of our resources and networks among academic geographies of prestige. I wish to acknowledge that much of this book could not have been completed from the margins of those institutional hierarchies, and I pledge to continue the work of building an inclusive academy in which resources are shared more equitably. Such exclusions muffle multitudes of voices, the grand polyphonic harmonies of medieval studies. I also wish to recognize the intellectual and emotional labor of scholars of color in our field, some of whom are involved in the professional collectives known as Medievalists of Color and RaceB4Race. They are doing the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii constant and uncompensated work of lifting the veil that has for so long attempted to conceal the foundational and structural racism, misogyny, and institutional elitism of our field. I am thankful for their voices, their work, and their presence.

Numerous institutions have made this book possible. I am grateful to them as well as to the people who have enabled me to acquire their resources and participate in their support. Funding for the research and writing of this book was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, and the Louisiana Board of Regents. My ability to accept their funding and to present myself as a competitive candidate was entirely contingent on a cadre of caregivers, alternate kinship networks, and taxpayer-funded schools and after-care programs. Thank you especially to Pearson and Lisa Cross, Juliet Guzzetta, Joshua Yumibe, and Alex Zapruder, who provided me and my family with affective care as well as encouraged, prepared meals, organized playdates, and otherwise made my work and life possible. I also wish to thank the librarians and staff at the KBR, the Université de Liège, the Archives de l'État en Belgique, the British Library, and Hodges Library, especially Shaina Destine and Rachel Caldwell, and the administrative staff in my department and in the UT Humanities Center, Mary Beckley, Kim Harrison, Bernie Koprince, and Joan Viola Murray. The ability to access resources requires not only extensive time and funding, but also mobility. During this book’s final stages, I was aided immeasurably by my research assistant, the remarkable Bradley Phillis, who helped me sort through sources when I was unable to do so on my own; this book could not have been completed without his efforts. Also at those final stages, the incredible editorial team at Cornell University stepped in with a fresh supply of enthusiasm and rhetorical wizardry. My sincere appreciation goes to Mahinder Kingra, Bethany Wasik, and Karen Hwa for shepherding this book to publication.

I have enjoyed the outstanding unearned privilege of being born into a family that heeds no bounds in matters of love, adventure, support, and good humor. Each one of them has cared for me in ways that have fundamentally enabled this book’s existence. Lynne Bauersfeld, Jay Krachmer, Kathryn Maraist Krachmer, Liz Maraist, Christine Ritchey Weber, and my (as of this writing) 103-year-old grandmother, Gertrude Melancon Maraist, have been a constant source of material and emotional support. Malisa Troutman Dorn, Chris Dorn, Kit and Carl Dorn, and Dolores Vaughn make my family complete and help me to cherish the memory and example of Rebekah Vaughn Troutman and John Vaughn, whose absence grips me daily. Every page of this book is a memorial to Rebekah’s work, to her capacity to infuse life xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and dignity into her community through acts of care. Scot Ritchey, Carly Ingvalson, and my beloved William Jude Ritchey supply me with the heartiest love and laughter I have ever known; I am so grateful that they are part of my life. And I cherish the love and partnership of John Troutman, who, in addition to reading drafts and suggesting revisions in all of my writing, maintains the work of our family while I travel every week. He has believed in me, whoever I am, and provided every support for the person I am still becoming; I can think of no greater gift. None of these efforts would be worth expending without the imagination and wit of our son, Jack Florian, who supplies the soundtrack of our days, their rhythm and harmony, and a reason to celebrate. My thanks to all of you for the richness and possibility you have brought into my life.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ron Ritchey and Margaret Maraist Ritchey. All that I really know about health and care has come from experiencing their love. My father’s boundless reserves of creative energy and his will to research and revise his own care practices have taught me how to use art, work, and care of self and others to overcome my isolation. He has been my source of serenity and encouragement when could not muster the strength to supply my own. My mother is a most rare creature: every person she encounters is transformed by her ability to pierce humanity deep within the layers of pain and performance we all carry. She has given me everything, while staring directly into the eyes of strife, melting it, and radiating joy. It is an honor to call myself theirs.

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ACTS OF CARE

Introduction: To Heed the Trace

A young beguine named Ida, who later joined the Cistercian community of Roosendaal, routinely visited the poor and sick in her hometown of Leuven, providing them with food, clothing, and other bodily comforts." The unnamed Cistercian monk who recorded her Life in the later thirteenth century reports that Ida was once called to a nearby home where she found a man in bed (aegrotus), nearly dead, and already having received the viaticum. She quickly inquired into the man’s illness, eliciting information about the exact site and symptoms he experienced. After inspecting his pestiferous swelling, Ida drained the puss, and oversaw the salubrious results, which included the reduction of pain and swelling. Ida’s success in healing the man proved pivotal for her reputation in the larger community:

Thus the virgin of God, from this day forward and hereafter, is held in great esteem, clothed with the ornament of sanctity by all that received notice of these events. Indeed all who had seen it for themselves, or had heard of it, shared the unwavering conviction that it was through the merits of the venerable Ida that the vexation of the harshest pain was so dispersed and health, arriving just so suddenly and unexpectedly,

1. Vita Idae de Lovanio (BHL 4145), in Acta sanctorum (AASS) April II, 157D-189F; hereafter VILeuv.

took new form in the same sick person. Many took to telling the story of it far and wide, which promoted the fame of Ida’s virginal holiness throughout the surrounding region.’

According to this report, Ida’s successful treatment of the patient promoted her reputation for “virginal holiness”; that is, her health-giving intervention cinched her fama not as a healthcare practitioner, but as a “virgin of God.” As the citizens of Leuven rendered this healing event into story, they crafted Ida’s image as a holy woman. A Cistercian monk then recorded this orally circulating story and assembled it, along with other tales of her “virginal holiness,” into a narrative of Ida’s sanctity. This transmission process points to the ways that religious women’s therapeutic authority was encoded, and then eroded, in other social norms in thirteenth-century Europe. Ida’s activity as an efficacious bedside healer was subsumed by her gendered reputation for sanctity. Her therapeutic actions were recorded not as demonstrations of medical acumen but as examples of her intense religiosity.

The case of Ida spotlights the kinds of historical trajectories through which the healthcare behaviors she exhibited, behaviors displayed by numerous women in the thirteenth-century southern Low Countries, failed to be translated as “medical” sources and thus as “medical” history? Women living as beguines and Cistercian nuns in this region served as nurses, herbalists, everyday caretakers, and wonder-workers who assisted patients using charms, blessings, relics, meditations, and prayers, in addition to herbs, stones, purgatives, phlebotomy, and maintenance of a daily regimen. Their labor was increasingly necessary as social needs became more visible under the pressure of the region’s rapid urbanization, a response to the growth of the textile industries and the associated expansion of overland trade from Bruges to Cologne throughout the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.* Women immigrated

3. My use of the term "medicine" throughout this book should be distinguished from contemporary Western concepts of "biomedicine." The term "medicine" is more encompassing than biology-based systems of health knowledge because it appreciates various cultures of illness and treatment. On this distinction, see Atwood Gaines and Robbie Davis-Floyd, "Biomedicine," in Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures, ed. Carol Ember and Melvin Ember (New York: Springer, 2004), n.p.

4. On the expansion of trade and urbanization, see Peter Stabel, Dwarfs among Giants: The Flemish Urban Network in the Late Middle Ages (Louvain: Garant, 1997). On the connection between to centers of industry and manufacturing such as Cambrai, Ypres, Bruges, Douai, Leuven, and Brussels, where they found domestic, textile, and hospital work, and regularly engaged in public activities. The women investigated in this book inhabited this urban social scene. They founded, managed, and staffed hospitals, leprosaria, and infirmaries; they cared for the dead and prepared bodies for burial; and they sometimes worked outside of institutional settings, begging for food, medicines, or clothing on behalf of the sick and infirm. They visited the sick and dying at bedsides in private homes, and occasionally the sick would journey from afar to access their healthcare services. This book seeks to reconstruct the therapeutic epistemologies that animated their practices; that is, it looks for the kinds of thinking, the logic or specific rationale, that brought together the variety of caregiving practices religious women used.

Such an endeavor must confront the vexing question of sources, of their supposed scarcity, and of what “counts” as medical history or medical knowledge. It is a lack of sources, scholars have assumed, that makes it difficult if not impossible to write a history of women practitioners in the later Middle Ages. For example, after remarking on the extensive healthcare institutions founded and staffed by beguines, Walter Simons notes that although these women must have received training, “such expertise has unfortunately remained undocumented."* And Simons would know. His Cities of Ladies is the most comprehensively researched recent account of beguine foundations in this region. At one point, he notes that caregiving was so closely associated with beguine patterns of charity that the terms “beguine convent” and “beguine hospital” were often used synonymously in the sources.’

urbanization and the need for hospital work, see Pierre de Spiegeler, Les hôpitaux et l'assistance à Liège: Aspects institutionnels et sociaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987), 55.

5. On the demographics suggesting that women outnumbered men in the southern Low Countries, see Roger Mols, Introduction à la démographie historique des villes du Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle (Gembloux: Duculot, 1954), 2:374-75; and Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Walter Simons discusses the unequal migration patterns of women and men in “The Beguine Movement in the Southern Low Countries: A Reassessment,” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 59 (1989): 63-105; Henri Pirenne, “Les dénombrements de la population d’Ypres au XVe siècle (1412-1506): Contribution à la statistique sociale du Moyen Âge,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1903): 1-32 is slightly later but discusses the role of women as domestic servants. On the public visibility of women as stall managers, vendors, teachers, and innkeepers, see Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 10; and Jan Van Gerven, “Vrouwen, arbeid en sociale positie: Een voorlopig onderzoek naar de economische rol en maatschappelijke positie van vrouwen in de Brabantse steden in de late Middeleeuwen,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 73 (1995): 947-66.

7. Simons, 77.

It is here that I stake my intervention into the history both of premodern medicine and of medieval religion and gender. The sources for religious women’s caregiving exist. Their recovery simply demands a shift in our thinking about how gendered interactions shape the documentary record. For too long, medievalists have read the sources we do have—psalters, prayers, saints’ Lives, miracles, relics, liturgical rites—as having little to say about health, healing, care work, and medical practice.? Indeed, the overdetermination of late medieval holy women as imitating Christ’s suffering has masked the historically situated ways that their embodied performances of prayer and penance also carried medical significations that mattered deeply to the communities surrounding them. Their prayers were experienced as efficacious healthcare practices by those who supported them. Any version of medieval medicine that excludes the demand for, and the perceived effects of, prayer and penance, therefore, is incomplete. The sources of women’s bodily therapies, I argue, come not in the form of coherent academic treatises, but in “fragile traces” detectable in liturgy, poetry, recipes, meditations, sacred objects, and the everyday behaviors that constituted their world.’

The sources I explore in this book are necessarily fragmentary. They are traces of a practice long forgotten as therapeutic." These traces often appear to scholars of medieval history and religion, and are interpreted and perpetuated by them, as “religious” texts or ritualistic behavior, not as medical practices. I refer to these traces of past practices as "therapeutic" in order to frame them as knowledge and behaviors that fall somewhere in between our current conceptualizations of medicine and religion, as "treatments." There is an abundance of scholarly precedence for framing premodern healthcare in this way. For example, the medical historian Vivian Nutton notes that Galen used the term therapeutes to indicate a kind of caregiving and body knowledge connected

8. This is a point made repeatedly by Monica Green in "Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women's Medicine," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, ser. 3, 5 (2005): 1-46.

9. Informing my approach here is the work of Patricia Hill Collins, who provides a framework for deciphering examples of Black women's knowledge and resistance. She argues that "suppression of Black women's ideas within white male-controlled social institutions led African American women to use music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for constructing a Black feminist consciousness." Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2002), 251—52. Nancy Rose Hunt addresses the search for "fragile acoustic traces" in "An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition," Cultural Anthropology 23.2 (2008): 220—53.

10. On this process of forgetting the original significations of social practices, see Diana Taylor,

“Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’ Studies," PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1416-30.

to “active worship.”'' More recently, the literary historian Daniel McCann has opted for the terminology of “treatment” to encompass the biological, psychological, and social factors pertinent to efficacy." My use of “therapeutic treatments” as a frame for examining premodern healing practices is informed by my experiences growing up in an Acadian bayou town in southern Louisiana, a region to which I returned as an adult professor of medieval history. There, healers known as traiteurs and traiteuses have for centuries used prayer, herbal remedies, touch, and ligatures to address an array of afflictions ranging from bug bites to angina.? They do not accept money as payment, and their traitements (treatments), along with the power to wield them efficaciously, are passed down orally. They do not position themselves in competition with professional biomedical practitioners, but they are an essential component of the healthcare landscape of this region (or at least they were until the mid-twentieth century— these practices have slowly begun to fade as the Acadiana region has become more commercialized, medicalized, and suburban)."* I propose the term “therapeutic treatments" to describe the caregiving work provided by thirteenth-century religious women because it mingles the physical, social, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their approach to health and care. Like traiteurs, their treatments included prayer, touch, counsel, and herbal remedies, in addition to feeding, cleaning, and the provision of daily comfort and assurance. If we consider these treatments from within the context of religious women's communal circuits of care, we can begin to restore their therapeutic meanings.

11. Vivan Nutton, "God, Galen, and the Depaganization of Ancient Religion," in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 25.

12. Daniel McCann, Soul Health: Therapeutic Reading in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), 6.

13. This occupational title might best be rendered in English as "treaters." The Dictionary of Louisiana French translates traiteur as “traditional healer, faith healer.” See Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities, ed. Albert Valdman et al. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 628. This rendering, however, does not quite grasp the blended modes of therapy used by traiteurs, which involved prayers, incantations, nonsensical secret phrases, touch, cordons (ligatures), benisons (blessings), and herbal remedies, especially teas, tonics, and catepans (poultices). Some basic remedies involved burying a nail after making the sign of the cross on an afflicted body part and applying holy water or wax to an afflicted limb while saying a prayer. These traitements, along with the power to wield them efficaciously, are passed down orally. It is for this reason, in part, that very few historians have examined traiteurs, although they do have a place in folklore studies. An earlier study, from the perspective of folklore, is Anna Boudreaux, "Les remédes du vieux temps: Remedies and Cures of the Kaplan Area in Southwest Louisiana," Southern Folklore Quarterly 35.2 (1971): 121-40.

14. The legal and professional process of eroding these healthcare practices was underway even earlier. A February 1919 action in the circuit court of appeals sitting at Baton Rouge, for example, made injunction against two “notorious” traiteurs from Lafayette parish, prohibiting them from practicing medicine. Abbeville Meridional, 8 Feb. 1919.

Reading “Nonevidence”

Scholars have long noted that the household operated as the first “port of call” for the sick within premodern Europe, where women provided “the basic recourse for medical care."? They were primarily responsible for daily "bodywork"—the maintenance of diet, cleanliness, and comfort.'^ As Mary Fissell has noted, women were central to the practice of everyday healthcare: "Almost everyone in early modern Europe was brought into the world by women and ushered out of it by women. Women's hands birthed babies, cut umbilical cords, and swaddled newborns. Women's hands treated the sick, comforted the dying, and laid out bodies, readying them for burial.” Peter Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith have made similar observations about the omnipresence of women practitioners in Islamicate societies, noting that they were responsible for the medical needs of children, husbands, and other members of the extended family and "contributed fundamentally to the health of the wider society." '? Anthropological and sociological analysis confirms the picture of woman-dominated caregiving within the domestic sphere." In other words, we know that the daily healthcare needs of medieval

15. Margaret Pelling, "Thoroughly Resented? Older Women and the Medical Role in Early Modern London," in Women, Science, and Medicine, 1500-1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997), 70; Alicia Rankin, Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3. In this book, I will use Monica Green's definition of "female medical practitioners" as “women who at some point in their lives would have either identified themselves in terms of their medical practice or been so identified by their communities." Monica Green, "Documenting Medieval Women's Medical Practice," in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García-Ballester, Jon French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 335-36. Green's definition is an adaptation of Margaret Pelling and Charles Webster's notion of medical practitioner as "anyone whose occupation is basically concerned with care of the sick." See Margaret Pelling and Charles Webster, "Medical Practitioners," in Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165-235.

16. Mary Fissell developed the concept of "bodywork" to grasp the range of caregiving approaches to suffering bodies. Fissell writes, "I am not proposing that we replace the category ‘medicine’ with body work; rather, that we investigate the relationship between the work we consider medicine and the broader category of attending to the human body, and perhaps place medicine and its learned traditions within or next to the larger category of bodywork or body technologies." Mary Fissell, "Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82.1 (2008): 11. Fissell builds on previous scholarship, such as Sandra Cavallo's notion of "artisans of the body," in Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Montserrat Cabré's notion of modification of body surfaces, in "From a Master to a Laywoman: A Feminine Manual of Self-Help,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 371-93; and Monica Green's term "technologies of the body" in “Gender, Health, Disease."

17. Fissell, "Introduction," 1.

18. Peter Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 103.

19. Forcaregiving statistics, see Nicholas T. Bott, Clifford Sheckter, and Arnold Milstein, "Dementia Care, Women's Health, and Gender Equity: The Value of Well-Timed Caregiver Support," JAMA communities were numerically dominated by women, the vast majority of whom did not develop reputations as saints. And yet, as Monica Green has noted, scholars are confronted by the abiding problem of "nonevidence"; that is, women rarely appear in documents of medical practice or in our resulting historical narratives of premodern medicine.^?

Where professional records do exist, they scarcely capture the presence of women healthcare practitioners. For example, Danielle Jacquart's 1981 study of three centuries of medical practitioners in France, which included midwives, turned up just 127 women, or 1.5 percent of the total recorded practitioners.” In England, women made up 1.2 percent of the total, and in the Kingdom of Aragon three women out of five hundred (or 0.6 percent) appear to have held titles as practitioners of healthcare." Turning from archival sources to medical treatises, we find that, on the rare occasions that practitioners identified as women do appear in academic medical literature, it is only to denounce their foolishness in matters of the body that should be left to trained—that is, to literate male—physicians. For example, when Teodorico Borgognoni, the thirteenth-century Dominican bishop of Bitonto and later of Cervia and sometime master of medicine and surgery at the University of Bologna, transmitted a small sample of verbal remedies in his Latin Chirurgia, he professed deep hesitation, stating that they struck him as “more the concoction[s] of old women than the prescriptions of a prudent man."? Gendered comparatives such as Teodorico's, which distinguish women's verbal remedies from men's learned prescriptions, are found throughout later medieval European texts of scholastic medicine and surgery.” In order to legitimize the transmission of

Neurology 74.7 (2017): 757-58; on gender, caregiving, and emotional labor, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley: University of Caifornia Press, 2003); and Amy Wharton, "The Sociology of Emotional Labor," American Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 147-65; for a historical approach in the US context, see Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

20. Green, "Gender, Health, Disease," 18.

21. Danielle Jacquart, Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 47-55; Monica Green supplemented Jacquart's list with an additional six healers in “Documenting Medieval Women's Medical Practice." On the English sources, see Stuart Jenks, "Medizinische Fachkrafte in England zur Zeit Heinrichs VI (1428/9—1460/61)," Sudhoffs Archiv 69.2 (1985): 214-27.

22. For England, see Monica Green, "Women's Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe," Signs 14 (1989): 434—73; for Aragon, see Carmel Ferrargud Domingo, Medicina i promoció social a la baixa edat mitjana: Corona d'Aragó 1350-1410 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005), 76.

23. Teodorico Borgognoni, Chirurgia, in Ars chirurgia Guidonis Cauliaci (Venice, 1546), fol. 158v: "quia magis videntur nobis vetularum esse quam prudentis viri"; trans. E. Campbell and J. Colton, The Surgery of Theodoric (New York: 1960), 2:17.

24. On denunciations of women's remedies in scholastic medical treatises, see Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, "Savoir médical et anthropologie religieuse: Les représentations et fonctions de la vetula (XIIIe-XVe siécle),” Annales: Economies, Société, Civilisations 48.5 (1993): 1281-1308.