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IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 1106: Religion, Medicine, and Gender in Late Medieval Culture, II

Wednesday 13 July 2011, 11.15-12.45

Sponsor:Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University
Organiser:Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University
Moderator/Chair:Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Shizuoka University
Paper 1106-a'Like a devoted physician': The Anchoritic Text as Medicine for the Soul
(Language: English)
Liz Herbert McAvoy, Department of English Language & Literature, Swansea University
Index terms: Gender Studies, Medicine, Religious Life
Paper 1106-bGender, Religion, and Pathology: Medical Imagery and the Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval Devotional Literature
(Language: English)
Catherine J. Batt, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds
Index terms: Gender Studies, 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.