Conceiving Bodies

Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic, and penitential traditions in order to find 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 judgment for women's bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon existing texts centuries after their composition, although 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 general categories like 'women's medicine' or 'childbirth charms', the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. Because of the lack of close attention to language, translators often have misidentified the functions of these remedies. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth, and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women.While its central content is medieval, this book places early women's medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of women's 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.Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognizes and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies.