She will give birth immediately: pregnancy and childbirth in medieval Hebrew medical texts produced in the Mediterranean West

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Abstract

This essay approaches the medieval Hebrew literature on women's healthcare, with the aim of analysing notions and ideas regarding fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, as conveyed in the texts that form the corpus. Firstly, the work discusses the approach of written texts to pregnancy and childbirth as key elements in the explanation of women's health and the functioning of the female body. In this regard it also explores the role of this approach in the creation of meanings for both the female body and sexual difference. Secondly, it examines female management of pregnancy and childbirth as recorded in Hebrew medical literature. It pays attention to both the attitudes expressed by the authors, translators and copyists regarding female practice, as well as to instances and remedies derived from "local" traditions -that is, from women's experience- in the management of pregnancy and childbirth, also recorded in the texts. Finally, the paper explores how medical theories alien to, or in opposition to, Judaism were adopted or not and, at times, adapted to Jewish notions with the aim of eliminating tensions from the text, on the one hand, and providing Jewish practitioners with adequate training to retain their Christian clientele, on the other.

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Women or healers? Household practices and the categories of health care in late medieval Iberia.

Montserrat Cabré (2008)

Assessments of medieval health care used to focus on practitioners holding some sort of occupational label, resulting in a meager representation of women. This article intends to illustrate how women's significant contribution to healthcare can be mapped out by looking at the domestic space that is largely left outside the histories of medieval medicine. First, it explores the language that names women's activities to maintain health and alleviate illness, showing how words identifying women's capacities to heal come from everyday actions and belong to the semantic domain of women and mothers. The caring meanings ascribed to the words women, mothers, midwives, and nurses in the Iberian mother tongues conflate and describe a continuum of practice whose origin is the household, from where it expands to the community. Second, it discusses the importance of women's ordinary domestic care within the theoretical frame of the six non-naturals, particularly feeding and nourishing, as well as presenting the household as an open and flexible space providing health care beyond the family. Third, by considering recipes as privileged evidence, it attempts to piece together a preliminary textual history of women's household knowledges that for centuries had been circumscribed to the domain of the oral. It identifies the written contexts where women's recipes appear through a long timespan, attesting changes in women's literate practices that give rise to new genres that illuminate a sphere previously opaque to the historical record.