What can anthropological and folkloristic approaches to food, gender, and medicine tell us about these topics in the Middle Ages beyond the textual evidence itself? Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours uses these approaches to look at the textual traditions of dietary recommendations for women’s health, placed within the context of the larger cultural concerns of gender roles and Church teachings about women. Women are expected to be nurturers, healers, and the primary locus of food provisioning for families, especially women of the lower social classes, typically overlooked in the written record. This work illuminates what we can know about women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages, and examines how the written medical tradition interacts with folk medicine and other cultural factors in both understanding women’s bodies and their roles as healers and food providers.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers
- Anthropological approaches
- Work by medievalists
- How can we approach medieval sources?
- Women as healers
- Women as food producers
- Nurturing and gender
- Pushed out of the medical profession, pushed out of the kitchen
- 2. Medieval Theories of Nutrition and Health
- The Greek tradition
- Galen of Pergamum
- Anthimus
- Medical writers in the medieval Islamic world
- The medieval west
- 3. The Special Problem of Nutrition and Women’s Health
- Class, gender, diet, and humoral theory
- Aristotle
- The Hippocratic Corpus
- Soranus of Ephesus
- Galen of Pergamum
- The Islamic texts of the Arabic systematists
- The Trotula
- Hildegard of Bingen
- De secretis mulierum
- Regimina sanitatis and Tacuina sanitatis
- Michele Savonarola
- Other writers
- Non-medical texts and folk beliefs
- 4. Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine
- The medieval diet
- Folk medicine
- Medieval medicine and folk medicine
- Women and folk medicine
- Theoretical medicine and folk medicine
- Efficacy and folk belief
- Women as healers
- Magic and belief
- 5. The Trotula and the Works of Hildegard of Bingen
- From Book on the Conditions of Women
- From On Treatments for Women
- Hildegard of Bingen
- Hildegard on natural philosophy and medicine
- Dietary recommendations from Causae et Curae
- Physica
- Alcohol consumption
- Hildegard on alcohol
- Similarities and contrasts in the Trotula and the works of Hildegard
- Were Hildegard and Trota practitioners of folk medicine?
- 6. The Legacy of the Trotula
- Tacuinum sanitatis
- Early cookbooks and health guidebooks
- Religion and the body
- Medieval gynaecological texts
- The Sekenesse of Wymmen
- 7. Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty
- Cosmetics
- Beauty and morality
- Medieval conduct literature
- Medieval ideas of beauty
- Obesity
- The body as symbol
- 8. Religious Conflict and Religious Accommodation
- The female body in medieval literature
- Food, sexuality, and religion
- Consequences of overindulgence
- Women and fasting
- Religion and medical recommendations for diet
- 9. Evolving Advice for Women’s Health Through Diet
- Women’s diet advice in the Early Modern Period
- The death of humoral theory
- Consciousness of health, consciousness of fashion
- Pregnancy and diet in the modern era
- Are women’s diets consistent across cultures?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
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