Overview

Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women’s medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women’s medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for ‘cleansing’ do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women’s reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philology — the combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies — this book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dana Oswald
Publisher:   Manchester University Press
Imprint:   Manchester University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.418kg
ISBN:  

9781526176882

ISBN 10:   1526176882
Pages:   232
Publication Date:   28 May 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

Introduction - Hysteric philology and the occlusion of the ordinary bodies of early medieval English women 1 The diagnostic body and the matter of menstruation in the remedies and penitentials 2 Fertility and pregnancy in the medical texts and prognostics 3 Overlap and overwriting in medical language for childbirth 4 Purging as treatment for miscarriage, stillbirth, and conception Conclusion - Womb to tomb: The afterlives of early medieval women’s remedies Index -- .

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Author Information

Dana Oswald is Associate Professor of Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside -- .

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