Despite reliance on ingredients like horse dung, Old English remedies for women's medicine speak to contemporary reproductive concerns. Previous translators reduced the remedies to a general category of women's medicine, but sustained examination of language reveals important distinctions: remedies for menstruation indicate social concerns about fertility, where remedies for 'cleansing' do not provide a clear path to conception, but rather foreclose it. Rarest of all are the remedies for childbirth, but their rarity is compounded by the practices of translators who conflate the language for women's reproduction into an amorphous singularity. Through an original method of hysteric philology - the combining of traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies - this book situates itself in the historical treatment of reproductive people as both objects and subjects of medical practice, and gestures forward in time to the contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy.
By:
Dana Oswald Imprint: Manchester University Press Country of Publication: United Kingdom Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 138mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 418g ISBN:9781526176882 ISBN 10: 1526176882 Series:Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Pages: 232 Publication Date:04 September 2024 Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Further / Higher Education
,
Primary
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
Dana Oswald is Associate Professor of Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside