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IMC 2024: Sessions

Session 541: Misogyny and Medicine: Medieval Echoes in Modern Responses to Childbirth and Pandemics

Tuesday 2 July 2024, 09:00-10:30

Organiser:IMC Programming Committee,
Moderator/Chair:Bettina Bildhauer, School of Modern Languages - German, University of St Andrews
Paper 541-aAn Early Modern View of a Medieval Rite: The Reform of the Churching Ceremony in Its Political and Theological Contexts
(Language: English)
Autumn Reinhardt-Simpson, Department of History, Classics & Religion, University of Alberta
Index terms: Gender Studies, Liturgy, Religious Life and Women's Studies
Paper 541-bCrisis, Pandemic, and Medicalisation: Repercussions of Medieval Strategies in the Response to COVID-19
(Language: Español)
Luis H. Pabón-Batlle, Departamento de Humanidades, Universidade de Puerto Rico Bayamon
Index terms: Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Law, Local History and Medicine
Abstract

This session has been grouped by the IMC Programming Committee from individually submitted paper proposals.

Paper a: In studying the medieval ceremony known as the Purification of Women after Childbirth (aka ‘churching’), scholars have focused mainly on meaning, in particular, the potential misogyny of the rite. However, comparing the liturgical texts against the political and theological contexts of Tudor and Stuart England reveals more nuanced understandings of changes in the rite that reflect contemporary power struggles over religious reform and gender, upending popular misconceptions about women’s reception of the reformed rite of churching. I compare the timeline of official reform proclamations to revisions in liturgy to reveal the evolution of a gendered rite considering larger social changes.

Paper b: From the Middle Ages to the present day, a genealogy of forms and strategies of "medicalization" can be traced. Authorities, progressively hoarding, after some pathology that puts the population at risk, limit existence, conduct, behavior, and body. Puerto Rico reveals to us, due to its historical circumstance, the influence of two different medical traditions. Those revived their genealogies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Strategies corresponds to the responses given to Bubonic Plague and regional diseases such as leprosy. We will expose the details of the practices comparatively, so that we can contemplate the medieval origin and its current manifestation.