Over the past two decades, historians of medicine have expanded the definition of healing to include what Mary E. Fissell has termed “bodywork”: a range of practices of care that includes nursing patients, feeding them, tending to their hygiene, and so on (“Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, no. 1 [2008]: 1–17). This broadening of the historiographical landscape was crucial in order to portray the full range of roles that women—often excluded from formal medical practice—played in the care and treatment of patients. Edited by Sara Ritchey and Sharon Strocchia, Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250 –1550 builds on this scholarship with the goal of creating an “integrative and hybrid model of analysis that illuminates the intersections between healthcare and other aspects of medieval and Renaissance culture” (15). The eleven essays in the collection work together admirably, with each essay highlighting one such intersection, while Ritchey and Strochia's introduction and Naama Cohen-Hanegbi's afterword frame the essays and tie them together into a cohesive work. The book, organized into four thematic sections, explores religious healing (tying together women's piety and healing practices), the transmission of medical knowledge by women and about women, different practices of care, and infertility and reproduction. The essays cover a wide chronological and geographical range, from medieval France to Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

What ties the essays together is the methodology for engaging with primary source material. Some of the contributors introduce readers to new or little-used sources: Iliana Kandzha taps a range of neglected medieval archival sources to show how Saint Cuniginde's cult acquired a particular association with women and women's medicine; Belle Tuten transcribes and translates sections of an short treatise on breastfeeding while contextualizing it in the historiography of breastfeeding advice; Sheila Barker and Strocchia look at recently discovered manuscripts of Caterina Sforza's medical collection to provide new insights on the authority of experiential knowledge in the Renaissance; and Ayman Yasin Atat offers the first English translation of a chapter in an Ottoman manual on the medicinal use of bathtubs, tracing the ways this manual built on earlier traditions in Arabic medicine but incorporated a new stress on household medicine and particularly bathing. Other contributors use familiar sources that have usually been used to study different histories, such as those of religion, law, or formal medicine, and read them in new ways to shed light on gendered and domestic care practices: Ritchey uses a thirteenth-century psalter to highlight how beguines incorporated liturgical practices into their care of patients in a Liège hospital; Eva-Maria Cersovsky traces the interpretations of the biblical proverb Sirach 36:27 and the meanings it accrued over time in order to understand medieval notions of women's care duties; Cordula Nolte uses a German illustrated surgeon's manual to understand the domestic spaces in which care took place in the sixteenth century and the gendered differences in the roles accorded to domestic servants in caring for patients; while Sara Verskin similarly looks at a range of Islamic medical and legal sources in order to contradict the common assertion that physicians in the medieval Islamic world could not offer practical gynecological and obstetrics treatment to female patients due to restrictions related to modesty. The final group of essays provides a fresh exploration of known medical sources by tracing the development of specific ideas over time or contextualizing them more broadly: Montserrat Cabré and Fernando Salmón trace medieval interpretation of Hippocratic aphorism 5.40 in order to understand how humoral physiology, flexible as it was, came to associate maternal bleeding breasts with madness; Julia Gruman Martins looks at the ways in which translations of a single medical book into French, and other vernaculars, adapted the text to new readerships and uses; and finally, Catherine Rider examines a range of Latin texts about infertility and age from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, noting that while in many ways they found age more important than gender in determining fertility, they nonetheless put more of the burden of age-related infertility on women than on men.

Gender, Health, and Healing offers readers well-researched, detailed case studies that read sources intelligently and creatively and use those sources to make clear, well-contained arguments. Read together, the essays create a complex image of late medieval and Renaissance healing as observed through a gendered lens, one which includes not only a range of healers—learned and lay, men and women, wives and servants—but also a range of locations (clinical and domestic), and a range of practices (humoral, religious, and magical). It is in portraying this “medical multiplicity” (17) that the strength of this collection lies.