In Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours, Theresa Vaughan states that her ultimate goal is to illuminate the ways in which food and dietary custom intersected with the lives of women in the Middle Ages (13). She approaches the material as an anthropologist and folklorist, arguing that an interdisciplinary approach to source materials can allow access to both the written tradition and the unwritten folkways of medieval medicine and women's health. In doing so, Vaughan synthesizes more than thirty years of secondary literature related to women, food, and the body across several fields.

Vaughan sets out the rationale for her approach in the first chapter, asserting that anthropological and folklore approaches “can help us understand what is happening on the ground, among the common people” (30). She describes the forms of evidence that she explores and sets out basic introductions to the many associations between medieval women, food, and culture. Written evidence for these associations, as she indicates, can be sparse, and is often geared toward the literate and wealthy; anthropological analysis and archaeology can fill in only some of the blanks.

The second chapter is a survey of humoral theory and background information on the treatment of the body from the Hippocratic corpus to the early Middle Ages. This Greek theoretical system of knowledge, adjusted and amended by scholars throughout the Middle Ages in both the Islamic world and the West, defined what made male and female bodies healthy. In chapter 3 Vaughan provides a survey of writers of ancient and medieval gynecological works and their recommendations for women's diets, as well as their connections to the theoretical tradition.

Chapter 4 addresses theoretical and practical medicine and their complex interactions. Vaughan provides a close analysis of how “theoretical,” “practical,” and “folk” medicine might be understood both by medieval people and by modern folklorists (91). Vaughan argues that women were more likely to be found practicing folk medicine, given the ways in which the hierarchy of medieval practitioners increasingly relegated women to the sidelines beginning in the thirteenth century. However, the lines between these categories are hard to draw, despite assertions by late medieval university-trained physicians that women such as midwives were superstitious and could not be trusted. It is more likely that such categories must be placed on a continuum of practice, for we do not know the extent to which university-trained physicians (who were very small in number) made use of folk beliefs, or how folk practitioners, male and female, might have been influenced by more text-based traditions. Vaughan rightly cautions against privileging the medical traditions that we might think were real or worked in light of a broad medieval tradition that was sometimes textual, sometimes oral, and often religio-magical.

In chapter 5 Vaughan examines two twelfth-century works on medicine written by women: the second book of the work known as the Trotula, and the writings of Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179), “with an eye towards discovering what can be determined about their relationship to folk medicine and regional variation to food consumption patterns in terms of their treatment recommendations” (111). Unfortunately, the second text of the Trotula, On Treatments for Women, is short and does not provide sufficient indications for whether the author was trained in the theoretical tradition, was purely an empirical practitioner, or occupied some place on the continuum between them. Similarly, although Hildegard's work diverges significantly from the Trotula in its understanding of women's health, we cannot know whether, as Vaughan suggests, she was drawing from folk knowledge. The idiosyncratic and creative Hildegard may or may not have had empirical experience with herbs or other remedies of the folk tradition.

Chapter 6 continues with an examination of the works influenced by the Trotula in the later Middle Ages, including a close examination of the Middle English text The Sekenesse of Wymmen. In chapter 7 Vaughan moves on to a discussion of diet and beauty as understood through the conduct literature of the period, with a particular focus on obesity. Chapter 8 addresses religion and its intersection with medieval ideas about virtue, diet, and health. In chapter 9 Vaughan provides an overview of her entire argument and pulls the concepts discussed in previous chapters into the contemporary age with a discussion of early modern and modern foodways.

Vaughan does several things very well in this book. The scope is sweeping and interesting. Clearly written and accessible, it should teach well to undergraduates new to the study of gender in the Middle Ages; each chapter can stand on its own. Readers interested in the broad study of foodways will find much to enjoy. However, the contrast drawn between traditional historical, anthropological, and folkloric methodologies sometimes seems forced, since, as Vaughan points out, medieval studies has long been interdisciplinary.

On the whole, Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages is a helpful contribution to the exploration of the culture of food, diet, and gender in the Middle Ages.