In Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (2014), John Slater et al. note that “there were many medical cultures [in the empire] . . . practices related to health and sickness were undertaken to a great extent by people without formal medical training who did not identify themselves as medical practitioners. This means that medical occupations and medical practices were not always related in discernable ways” (13–14). Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World expands on this observation, seeking to recover these “practices related to health and sickness” and reconsider them as a point of intersection between ideas of race, colonialism, and, above all, gender and sexuality. This collection therefore answers Alisha Rankin's claim put forth in Panaceia's Daughters: the women of early modern Iberia, Portugal, and their colonies have, in anglophone scholarship at least, often received short shrift. Over the course of ten chapters, the included essays provide some redress to this gap, demonstrating the panoply of ways that gender and sexuality intersected with conceptions of health and health management within the early modern Iberian Empire.

The volume itself is divided into three thematic sections: “Treatment Models,” “Representing Health,” and “Faith and Illness.” The first section will perhaps be most familiar to scholars of medicine, as it focuses on the identification and treatment of various health conditions, and the place of women in both. These four essays demonstrate both the active role that women took in managing their own health and that of others, and the anxieties that such participation engendered among those in power. In Sarah E. Owens's “Convent Medicine, Healing and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru,” for example, readers can observe how nuns, despite their cloistered status, were active consumers of medical knowledge and preparations, with fervent and deeply held convictions regarding each topic. Not only that, but they pushed back when they found their preferred methods of health management threatened, particularly by the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century. Ultimately, this section demonstrates the diversity of positions occupied by women within their various medical marketplaces: consumers (Owens), dispensers (Schmitz and López-Terrada), or even, as in the case of wet-nurses, producers of materia medica (Stolley).

The second section of the book, “Representing Health,” incorporates less traditional source bases for the analysis of health and healthcare, including early modern plays, pamphlets, and paintings. These essays are particularly useful for understanding how ideas about health and healthcare, and the role of women within each, were received by a larger audience. Emily Colbert Cairns's “Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain” takes the image of the virgo lactans as a starting point before turning to texts related to breastfeeding more generally. Together with Stolley's piece in the preceding section, it forms a useful couplet related to the racialized identity of early modern wet-nurses. The following two essays, by Velasco and Boyle, utilize early modern theatrical works, including Entremés de los aojados and the texts of Tirso de Molina, to highlight the ways in which the early modern stage negotiated the relationship between healing practice and gender.

In “Faith and Illness,” contributors explore the complex relationship between health and faith, both as a marker of identity and a tool for expiating illness. Manning's essay on how the Jesuit order managed ill health within its ranks is best viewed in concert with Mujica's piece on Carmelite women; considering these pieces together, the reader gains a sense not only for a shared concern on the part of early modern religious orders for the well-being of their members but also for the striking intensity and centrality of suffering in conceptions of ill health among female members of religious groups. This significance of the sexed body finds further expression in George A. Klaeren's article exploring developments in medico-religious thought regarding intrauterine baptisms and ensoulment; the pregnant female body was the bridge between two lives, two bodies, and two souls.

Ultimately, this collection highlights the wide variety of sources available for the study of health and healing in the early modern Iberian world. From account ledgers to paintings to inquisitorial proceedings, the richness, texture, and emotional core of these men and women's lived experiences come alive.