Conceiving Bodies - (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture) by Dana Oswald (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Old English remedies for women's reproductive ailments gesture to contemporary notions of bodily autonomy. Close examination of the remedies for menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, stillbirth, and abortion reveal distinctions among them, where previously they were understood reductively as women's medicine.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic and penitential traditions in order to discover the reproductive bodies of women in a corpus of literature that frequently participates in the occlusion of such bodies, and indeed such lives.

The early medieval medical tradition is refreshingly free of judgement for women's bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon texts centuries after their composition, and while patriarchal structures underpin the needs and treatments for early reproductive medicine, the language in these texts is far more nuanced than we might expect. Where previous translators and dictionaries have been content to collapse all remedies into broad categories like 'women's medicine' or 'childbirth charms, ' the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women.

Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognises and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies. While its central content is medieval, Conceiving bodies places early women's medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of reproductive bodies. Experiences like childbirth, menstrual woes and infertility create a through line by which bodies now may connect in visceral and emotional ways to bodies then.

About the Author

Dana Oswald is Associate Professor of Literatures and Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside