Inhalt
Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic and penitential traditions in order to discover the reproductive bodies of women in a corpus of literature that frequently participates in the occlusion of such bodies, and indeed such lives.
The early medieval medical tradition is refreshingly free of judgement for women's bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon texts centuries after their composition, and while patriarchal structures underpin the needs and treatments for early reproductive medicine, the language in these texts is far more nuanced than we might expect. Where previous translators and dictionaries have been content to collapse all remedies into broad categories like 'women's medicine' or 'childbirth charms, ' the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women.
Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognises and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies. While its central content is medieval, Conceiving bodies places early women's medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of reproductive bodies. Experiences like childbirth, menstrual woes and infertility create a through line by which bodies now may connect in visceral and emotional ways to bodies then.