1st Edition
Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and the Body in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Introduction: Perceptions, practices, and experiences of health in late medieval and early modern Europe
Anu Korhonen and Anni Hella
Chapter 1: Sacramentals, relics, healing and superstition in the late Middle Ages
Reima Välimäki
Chapter 2: A healing ointment of two saint-candidates: Medicine or religious relic?
Marika Räsänen
Chapter 3: Strong feelings, weak medicine: Two noble deaths in sixteenth-century Rome
Thomas V. Cohen
Chapter 4: Midwives in the neighbourhood in Rome circa 1600: History from fragments
Elizabeth S. Cohen
Chapter 5: Making medicine measurable: Debating mathematical medicine in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century
Heikki Mikkeli
Chapter 6: From demonic possession to contagious afflictions: The medico-theological worldview and practice of an eighteenth-century Swedish physician
Jonas Liliequist
Chapter 7: Inscribing the town on women’s bodies: Disorderly behaviour in Aberdeen, 1747–1800
Deborah Simonton
Chapter 8: ‘Put someone else in my place, since I am ill’: Health issues at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–39)
Anni Hella
Chapter 9: ‘Corrupted stomackes’: Ailing British bodies in the Levant, c. 1600
Eva Johanna Holmberg
Chapter 10: Alice Thornton’s torments: Experiencing pain in seventeenth-century England
Anu Korhonen
Chapter 11: ‘Wm: is but poorly’: Fortitude, family and faith in the face of illness
Elaine Chalus
Contributors
Index
Biography
Anni Hella is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland. Her primary research interests include medieval and Byzantine history, cultural and religious relations between East and West, and the cultural history of books.
Anu Korhonen is a senior lecturer in European Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include gender and the body, humor and laughter, and popular culture in early modern England and Europe. She has also published on cultural and historical theory.
