Conceiving Bodies: Reproduction in Early Medieval English Medicine

(Hardback)

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Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for womens medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of womens 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 womens reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philologythe combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologiesthis 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.

Author Bio

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