Dedication

pp v-vi

Contents

pp vii-viii

Contributors

pp ix-xii

Acknowledgements

pp xiii-xiv

Abbreviations

pp xv-xvi

Introduction

pp 1-24

Part I - Mary the Physician

pp 25-26

1 - Mary the Physician: Women, Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages

pp 27-44

2 - Chaucer’s Physicians: Raising Questions of Authority

pp 45-64

Part II - Female Mysticism and Metaphors of Illness

pp 65-66

3 - Heavenly Vision and Psychosomatic Healing: Medical Discourse in Mechtild of Hackeborn’s The Booke of Gostlye Grace

pp 67-84

4 - Bathing in Blood: The Medicinal Cures of Anchoritic Devotion

pp 85-102

5 - ‘Maybe I’m Crazy?’ Diagnosis and Contextualisation of Medieval Female Mystics

pp 103-120

Part III - Fifteenth-Century Poetry and Theological Prose

pp 121-122

6 - Purgatory and Spiritual Healing in John Audelay’s Poems

pp 123-138

7 - Reginald Pecock’s Reading Heart and the Health of Body and Soul

pp 139-158

Part IV - Disfigurement and Disability

pp 159-160

8 - Disabled Children: Birth Defects, Causality and Guilt

pp 161-180

9 - Marking the Face, Curing the Soul? Reading the Disfigurement of Women in the Later Middle Ages

pp 181-202

10 - Did Drunkenness Dim the Sight? Medieval Understandings and Responses to Blindness in Medical and Religious Discourse

pp 203-220

11 - Between Palliative Care and Curing the Soul: Medical and Religious Responses to Leprosy in France and England, c. 1100–c. 1500

pp 221-236

Afterword

pp 237-248

Select Bibliography

pp 249-280

Index

pp 281-293

Gender in the Middle Ages

pp 294-294