IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 1006: Religion, Medicine, and Gender in Late Medieval Culture, I

Wednesday 13 July 2011, 09.00-10.30

Sponsor:	Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University
Organiser:	Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University
Moderator/Chair:	Liz Herbert McAvoy, Department of English Language & Literature, Swansea University
Paper 1006-a	Paralysing Women (Language: English) Christina Lee, School of English, University of Nottingham Index terms: Medicine, Women's Studies
Paper 1006-b	Women, Religion, and Death in the Middle Ages (Language: English) Diane Watt, Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University Index terms: Gender Studies, Medicine
Paper 1006-c	Heavenly Vision and Psychosomatic Healing: Medical Discourse in Mechthild of Hackeborn's The Booke of Gostlye Grace (Language: English) Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University Index terms: Liturgy, Medicine, Religious Life
Abstract	Sessions I and II consider the convergence and occasional divergences between devotional and medical discourses and contextualise them as part of medieval culture. The inseparability of bodily and spiritual concerns in the medieval period is witnessed in both medical and devotional texts: both impregnate one another thematically and by means of powerful metaphorical utterances carried over from one domain to the other. Devotional and medical discourses are also inflected by gender. One of the aims of the sessions is to investigate women's spiritual, metaphorical, and physical experience in the context of the history of medieval medicine. The texts we cover will range from Aelfric's Catholic Homilies to late medieval materials.