Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe explores the rich cultural history of bodily experience through diverse case studies spanning from Italy to Sweden and from England to the Levant.
How did medieval and early modern Europeans experience and understand sickness and health? How did they interact with health professionals and authorities, and which cultural and social networks shaped their understanding of wellness and illness? Drawing from extensive primary sources, this book examines how people of the past navigated their bodies' vulnerabilities both at home and abroad. It reveals how they consulted and challenged medical and civic authorities while seeking both physical and spiritual healing through religious practice.
Covering a broad temporal span from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, this collection of essays reimagines the role of material bodies and their social and emotional significance in medieval and early modern cultural history. The work offers fresh insights into the intersection of medicine, culture, and society across five centuries of European experience.
Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe explores the rich cultural history of bodily experience through diverse case studies spanning from Italy to Sweden and from England to the Levant.
Introduction: Perceptions, practices, and experiences of health in late
medieval and early modern Europe
Anu Korhonen and Anni Hella
Chapter 1: Sacramentals, relics, healing and superstition in the late Middle
Ages
Reima Välimäki
Chapter 2: A healing ointment of two saint-candidates: Medicine or religious
relic?
Marika Räsänen
Chapter 3: Strong feelings, weak medicine: Two noble deaths in
sixteenth-century Rome
Thomas V. Cohen
Chapter 4: Midwives in the neighbourhood in Rome circa 1600: History from
fragments
Elizabeth S. Cohen
Chapter 5: Making medicine measurable: Debating mathematical medicine in
Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century
Heikki Mikkeli
Chapter 6: From demonic possession to contagious afflictions: The
medico-theological worldview and practice of an eighteenth-century Swedish
physician
Jonas Liliequist
Chapter 7: Inscribing the town on womens bodies: Disorderly behaviour in
Aberdeen, 17471800
Deborah Simonton
Chapter 8: Put someone else in my place, since I am ill: Health issues at
the Council of FerraraFlorence (143839)
Anni Hella
Chapter 9: Corrupted stomackes: Ailing British bodies in the Levant, c.
1600
Eva Johanna Holmberg
Chapter 10: Alice Thorntons torments: Experiencing pain in
seventeenth-century England
Anu Korhonen
Chapter 11: Wm: is but poorly: Fortitude, family and faith in the face of
illness
Elaine Chalus
Contributors
Index
Anni Hella is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland. Her primary research interests include medieval and Byzantine history, cultural and religious relations between East and West, and the cultural history of books.
Anu Korhonen is a senior lecturer in European Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include gender and the body, humor and laughter, and popular culture in early modern England and Europe. She has also published on cultural and historical theory.
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