Jennifer Borland's Visualizing Household Health analyzes the historiated initials in seven illustrated copies of the Régime du corps, composed in 1256 by Aldobrandino of Siena. Aldobrandino's text was one of the first vernacular healthcare regimens, a genre of medical literature that became popular in the thirteenth century and was premised on the Galenic theory that health depended in part on regulating the six “non-naturals”: air, food and drink, exertion and rest, sleep and wakefulness, evacuation and repletion, and emotions. By extracting and distilling medical advice from Latin texts by Joannitius and Avicenna, among others, Aldobrandino produced one of the first vernacular healthcare manuals of its kind. He did so, according to the prologue of the Régime, at the behest of Beatrice of Savoy, Countess of Provence, in advance of her travels to visit her four daughters, who were queens of England, France, Sicily, and Germany. The French text became enormously popular, surviving in seventy-five manuscripts.
Borland's focus in this book is on images rather than text, however, and as such she analyzes only the seven copies of the Régime that feature numerous historiated initials: three composed between 1265 and 1350 and another four composed in the fifteenth century. Though separated by more than a century, Borland contends that these two groups of manuscripts share a “visual language” that sheds light on their wealthy, lay—and, perhaps, female—readership (8). Borland admits that she cannot definitively place any one of these seven manuscripts in the hands of a female patron or reader, but her careful explication of the domestic scenes within their historiated initials, and her attention to each manuscript's “object itinerary,” enables her to postulate that these manuscripts are “compelling evidence for women as active agents within the household” (16).
Emphasizing the many roles that women took on as healers, managers, and caregivers within the domestic space, Borland's study builds on the important scholarship of Montserrat Cabré and Monica Green and joins recent publications by Elaine Leong, Sharon Strocchia, and Sara Ritchey that extend our understanding of premodern medicine beyond professional practitioners. What Borland contributes to this wealth of scholarship is an art historian's eye: though the text of the Régime conveys very little of domestic social hierarchies, Borland compellingly demonstrates in chapter 1, “The Visual Language of the Régime du Corps,” that the numerous historiated initials in these seven manuscripts do.
In this first chapter, by far Borland's strongest, she advances an argument that the spare illustrations within the constrained space of each historiated initial (there were upwards of 130 in later manuscripts) were full of narrative possibility. Their “freeze-frame” composition invited readers to imagine the outcome of medical treatments and reflect on the social relationships that made those treatments possible. Her careful reading of status in these images, represented through clothing or gesture, reveals the intimacy of household healthcare as organized and sometimes practiced by women. Chapter 2, “The Illustrated Manuscripts and their Audiences,” extends Borland's argument about female networks of care to suggest possible female patrons for the manuscripts themselves. Though none of the three earliest manuscripts in her study can be directly linked to Beatrice of Savoy, Borland traces their movements from centers of manuscript production in northern France across the Channel to England, arguing that these object itineraries reflect the familial ties between Beatrice's daughters. The later group of manuscripts also circulated within the English court, crossing the Channel from sites of production in France and Flanders.
In chapter 3, Borland describes the hierarchy of the medieval medical economy, broadly surveys Aldobrandino's textual sources, and describes other contemporary medical illustrations. Unfortunately, the specifics of Borland's seven manuscripts get lost in a chapter that too often reads like a literature review. Chapter 4, “Household Management, Status, and Care of the Body,” argues that the illustrated Régime manuscripts confirm that “mundane” household bodily care was an integral part of medieval medicine. Borland concludes that the Régime’s “wider range of household knowledges” challenges “conventional thinking” about the nature of medieval medicine (155). However, given that recent work by Strocchia and Cabré, among others, has shown that medieval healthcare included precisely these mundane household practices, Borland might have framed her argument as a confirmation rather than a challenge to existing scholarship.
Overall, however, Borland's beautiful book, ornamented with eighty-five illustrations and appended with three excellent tables describing the Régime manuscripts and their illustrations, will be a valuable resource for historians of medieval art and scholars of medieval medicine intent on understanding how women labored in service of their own health and that of their households.
