- 232 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women's medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women's medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for 'cleansing' do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women's reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philologyâthe combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologiesâthis book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Information
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Hysteric philology and the occlusion of the ordinary bodies of early medieval English women
- 1 The diagnostic body and the matter of menstruation in the remedies and penitentials
- 2 Fertility and pregnancy in the medical texts and prognostics
- 3 Overlap and overwriting in medical language for childbirth
- 4 Purging as treatment for miscarriage, stillbirth and conception
- Conclusion: Womb to tomb: The afterlives of early medieval womenâs remedies
- Bibliography
- Index