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E-book Acts of Care : Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health
According to this report, Ida’s successful treatment of the patient promoted her reputation for “virginal holiness”; that is, her health-giving intervention cinched her fama not as a healthcare practitioner, but as a “virgin of God.” As the citizens of Leuven rendered this healing event into story, they crafted Ida’s image as a holy woman. A Cistercian monk then recorded this orally circulat-ing story and assembled it, along with other tales of her “virginal holiness,” into a narrative of Ida’s sanctity. This transmission process points to the ways that religious women’s therapeutic authority was encoded, and then eroded, in other social norms in thirteenth-century Europe. Ida’s activity as an effica-cious bedside healer was subsumed by her gendered reputation for sanctity. Her therapeutic actions were recorded not as demonstrations of medical acu-men but as examples of her intense religiosity. The case of Ida spotlights the kinds of historical trajectories through which the healthcare behaviors she exhibited, behaviors displayed by numer-ous women in the thirteenth-century southern Low Countries, failed to be translated as “medical” sources and thus as “medical” history.
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