Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers
- 2 Medieval Theories of Nutrition and Health
- 3 The Special Problem of Nutrition and Women’s Health
- 4 Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine
- 5 The Trotula and the Works of Hildegard of Bingen
- 6 The Legacy of the Trotula
- 7 Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty
- 8 Religious Conflict and Religious Accommodation
- 9 Evolving Advice for Women’s Health Through Diet
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers
- 2 Medieval Theories of Nutrition and Health
- 3 The Special Problem of Nutrition and Women’s Health
- 4 Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine
- 5 The Trotula and the Works of Hildegard of Bingen
- 6 The Legacy of the Trotula
- 7 Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty
- 8 Religious Conflict and Religious Accommodation
- 9 Evolving Advice for Women’s Health Through Diet
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The introduction provides an overview of the research problems and how they will be approached, focusing particularly on how understanding women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages by using anthropological and folkloristic approaches can add to the understanding of these issues for non-elite populations. Research questions include: What do we know about women as food producers, feeders, and nurturers? What can be said about women as practitioners of folk or traditional medicine? How does this contrast with the written record of theoretical medicine? Finally, what were the cultural aspects surrounding women, food, and health, and how did it determine proper eating, fasting, and body shape?
Keywords: folk medicine, traditional medicine, medieval women, theoretical Medicine
What can we know about women, food, and diet in the Middle Ages? Here, I cover a number of different interrelated topics having to do with medical dietary recommendations for women from the theoretical and practical medical traditions, the basis for those recommendations, and what we can learn about the folk traditions surrounding women, food and medicine. The book goes on to explore the themes of women and food more generally in the Middle Ages, with some parallels drawn with the Early Modern to contemporary issues involving diet, gendered roles in preparing and eating food, and medical views of women and food. Thus, this book is not exclusively about the medieval tradition of theoretical medicine and the role of food in medicine as it pertains to women. Instead, I seek to situate that tradition within the greater cultural context of women of all social classes, gendered expectations for women in gathering, preparing food, and feeding others, and the gaze on the female body and how it has been understood by the medical world as well as other quarters.
I write this book not as an historian, but rather as someone trained in both anthropology and folklore in the United States, with the particular views of culture as a whole and folk culture that that education entails. Having spent most of my research career on gender and foodways, my turn to these subjects in the Middle Ages was as a result of establishing a teaching career in a field somewhat outside of my training: for the last twenty years I have taught in a department of Humanities and Philosophy, where I bring perspectives on both Western and non-Western cultures to students.
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- Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle AgesBalancing the Humours, pp. 13 - 22Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020