Cultural Perceptions of Health, Illness and the Body in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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.

• Introduction: Perceptions, practices, and experiences of health in late medieval and early modern Europe Anu Korhonen and Anni HellaChapter 1: Sacramentals, relics, healing and superstition in the late Middle AgesReima VälimäkiChapter 2: A healing ointment of two saint-candidates: Medicine or religious relic?Marika RäsänenChapter 3: Strong feelings, weak medicine: Two noble deaths in sixteenth-century RomeThomas V. CohenChapter 4: Midwives in the neighbourhood in Rome circa 1600: History from fragmentsElizabeth S. CohenChapter 5: Making medicine measurable: Debating mathematical medicine in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth centuryHeikki MikkeliChapter 6: From demonic possession to contagious afflictions: The medico-theological worldview and practice of an eighteenth-century Swedish physicianJonas LiliequistChapter 7: Inscribing the town on women’s bodies: Disorderly behaviour in Aberdeen, 1747–1800Deborah SimontonChapter 8: ‘Put someone else in my place, since I am ill’: Health issues at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–39)Anni HellaChapter 9: ‘Corrupted stomackes’: Ailing British bodies in the Levant, c. 1600Eva Johanna HolmbergChapter 10: Alice Thornton’s torments: Experiencing pain in seventeenth-century EnglandAnu KorhonenChapter 11: ‘Wm: is but poorly’: Fortitude, family and faith in the face of illnessElaine ChalusContributorsIndex