Acts of Care

Reviewed by: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey Sara M. Butler Sara Ritchey. Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xviii + 310 pp. Ill. $19.95 (978-1-5017-5832-4). Historians have long acknowledged the seemingly insurmountable hurdles of studying women’s participation in medieval medical care. While we know that most medicine was practiced domestically and administered by women, our source materials are almost entirely related to male, professional medicine. Sara Ritchey’s fascinating new book, however, offers us a way forward by demonstrating that we have simply been looking at the wrong primary sources. If we want to know more about women in medicine, we need to turn our attention to saints, in the case of this book, particularly religious women associated with the beguines and the Cistercians of the thirteenth-century Low Countries, women like Lutgard of Aywières and Ida of Nivelles. The sanctity of these women derived from the healing miracles for which they were best known. Studying these “communities of care” (p. 31), and the unconventional means of healing they endorsed, offers [End Page 594] us the best means to understand how health care, in the broadest sense of the term, was practiced on a daily basis in late medieval Europe. Divided into two chapters, Part One examines therapeutic narratives. Ritchey demonstrates how hagiographers deliberately constructed miracle stories as both a defense of and advertisement for women’s therapeutic treatments. The stories shaped patients’ expectations of medieval healthcare and routed any lingering concerns about the ability of women to heal. The multitude of stories depicting religious women tending to those on their deathbeds reminds us of the centrality of “charitable caregiving” (p. 80) to the identity of religious women. The terms “beguine convent” and “beguine hospital” (p. 3) were synonymous in medieval parlance for precisely that reason. Even when saintly men worked in the health-care professions, hagiography preferred to celebrate only women as caregivers. Part Two, which consists of one chapter, focuses on therapeutic knowledge, specifically, the various ways in which these women’s relics were employed in healthcare as a means to distribute God’s grace. Ritchey highlights the significance of medicine as a performance: healing is possible only if both medical practitioner and patient believe it to be. Trust in God exerts agency upon the body. Part Three, also divided into two chapters, addresses therapeutic practices. From the medieval perspective, a patient is an “ensouled body” (p. 185). Therefore, healing must be directed at both body and soul. This was the goal among beguine communities when performing the Psalter. The rhythmic recitation acted both as healthcare, and as a means to facilitate dying. Once again, Ritchey invites us to see medicine as a performance: prayers inscribed in Psalters were merely medicines waiting to be activated by the chanting of the beguines. In the final chapter, Ritchey returns to saint’s lives, this time as a “verbal relic” (p. 242). Saint’s lives act as a means to access the healing capacities of holy women. Reading the lives “reanimates” (p. 248) the saints and directs the divine grace still lingering in their bones to the needs of their patients. Acts of Care performs a vital and long overdue intervention in the study of medieval medicine, forcing us to move our gaze beyond the university environment. Academic medicine was employed by only a tiny minority of the medieval population. Few could afford the services of a university-trained physician. Thus, to learn about medicine and how it was practiced on the ground, we need to turn to less obviously medical source materials than the medical treatises of the era. In this respect, Ritchey’s study is groundbreaking. More important still, in acknowledging the inherently religious nature of medieval healthcare, Ritchey not only provides a gateway to a whole new world of medical source materials, but she is able to restore women to their rightful place in medieval healthcare. [End Page 595] Sara M. Butler The Ohio State University Copyright © 2021 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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