Medieval Studies Program | From Archive to Repertoire in Late Medieval Women’s Caregiving Communities

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11: Professor Sara Ritchey (History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville)

5 pm, Elvehjem L150: Public lecture. “From Archive to Repertoire in Late Medieval Women’s Caregiving Communities.”

Drawing on a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Latin sources, including saints’ lives, charters, psalters, devotional miscellanies, drama, and poetry, this talk will survey the performance of healthcare that religious women (primarily beguines and Cistercians) provided in hospitals, leprosaria, infirmaries, and bedsides. It speculates on how textual knowledge in these communities was augmented through oral elaboration and suggests ways that medievalists can recuperate submerged healthcare knowledge and practices from manuscript vestiges.

Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund and the Department of History.