2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

In order to locate sites of feminine authority in premodern medicine scholars must often turn to ecclesiastical and devotional sources in which roles such as handmaid, nun, saint, and mother offer glimpses into practices of bodily care. This panel, sponsored by the international and chronologically and geographically inclusive Hagiography Society, brings together scholars from three continents to illuminate a different mode of “sacred health technology,” by which we indicate the tools and resources that promised to yield both bodily and spiritual remedy, salus in the sense of both salvation and health. Our first presenter is a practitioner who instructs in palliative care in Australia, where she uses visual arts to train indigenous medical students to develop affective practices in their care rotations. Here, she examines the dead and dying in late medieval continental European prayer books, incorporating art historical techniques and archaeological findings to consider women’s roles in caring for the dead. Our second presenter, from the Netherlands, has a background in theatrical performance, an experience she harnesses to examine the spectacle of self-starvation among female saints in the medieval Low Countries. Developing the idea of fasting as a public behavior, she reveals the religious and political ramifications of this bodily technique of self mastery. Our third panelist, a historian from the U.S., explores the seventeenth-century canonization of an invented medieval saint who was said to intervene in abnormal childbirth. The proliferation of narratives about St. Ramon’s miraculous interventions enable her to historically situate the masculinization of childbirth assistance.