Affective Medicine: Later Medieval Healing Communities and the Feminization of Health Care Practices in the Thirteenth-Century Low Countries

This essay uses saints’ lives and miracle stories to demonstrate the various ways that religiously affiliated women managed for a socially marginalized population the daily experience of health and illness. In this essay I explore how people came to believe in a saint’s ability to heal, how they ada...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ritchey, Sara (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Penn State Univ. Press 2014
In: Journal of medieval religious cultures
Year: 2014, Volume: 40, Issue: 2, Pages: 113-143
Further subjects:B Miracles
B Saints
B Healing
B Liège
B verbal remedies
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Description
Summary:This essay uses saints’ lives and miracle stories to demonstrate the various ways that religiously affiliated women managed for a socially marginalized population the daily experience of health and illness. In this essay I explore how people came to believe in a saint’s ability to heal, how they adapted their feelings and intentions to affective models provided by her vita and miracles, and how they recounted their experiences of this adaptation in stories of bodily healing. I argue that, by examining the healing community that sick petitioners formed around female saints, we might come to recognize whole new categories of health on which medieval medical resources were premised. Furthermore, as scholars of religion, we may better understand the affective and devotional mechanisms through which the sick and indigent came to experience relief.
ISSN:2153-9650
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of medieval religious cultures