Drawing on a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Latin sources, including saints’ lives, charters, psalters, devotional miscellanies, drama, and poetry, this talk will survey the performance of healthcare that religious women (primarily beguines and Cistercians) provided in hospitals, leprosaria, infirmaries, and bedsides. It speculates on how textual knowledge in these communities was augmented through oral elaboration and suggests ways that medievalists can recuperate submerged healthcare knowledge and practices from manuscript vestiges.
The lecture will be preceded by a graduate student and faculty workshop at 14:30. Please contact Sarah Friedman (friedman23@wisc.edu) to participate.
Co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Medieval Studies Program, the Anonymous Fund, and the Department of History.
Medieval Art Research 