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Thesis ID: CBB299466819

A “medicyne of wordes”: Women, prayer, and healing in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England (2008)

Stephanie Lynn Volf (Author)
Bjork, Robert E. (Advisor)

Arizona State University
Bjork, Robert E.
Publication date: 2008
Language: English

URI: https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/docview/304686291/abstract/BFE353EB7BF742F4PQ/325?sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses

Publication Date: 2008
Physical Details: 403

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This study explores prayer, literature, and healing in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, focusing on the intersections between medieval women's medicine and spiritual devotion. More specifically, it argues that medieval women strove to harness the prophylactic power that the word/Word exerted over a psychosomatically unified body and soul. Evidence of this sort of therapy materializes in English books of hours and prayer scrolls dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The dissertation begins by investigating sources widely accessible to lay readers that promoted the idea that body and soul existed in a "psychosomatic unity." It explores the belief that illness resulted from sin, that virtue could be linked to good health, and that through prayer, emotion may be manipulated to elicit physical transformation. Later, the part of the book of hours most specifically connected with healing, The Little Office of the Virgin Mary, is addressed. This research considers the ways in which the Little Office inspired a devotional practice that used plaintive aspects of the psalms to promote emotional internalization, diagnosis, rehabilitation, and reintegration as a means to salvation of body and soul. Finally, the dissertation identifies two applications of prayer possibly inspired by books of hours. It discusses birthing girdles, scrolls of parchment inscribed with prayer and often worn by parturient mothers to ease—or even eliminate— the pain of childbirth. It also considers the ways in which Julian of Norwich emphasizes the salutary properties of prayer with regard to spiritual despair, a condition that, for Julian and her contemporaries, affected both the soul and the body. Julian's treatment of the condition betrays a particularly feminine understanding of prayer, speech, and modes of receiving and expressing sacred knowledge. On close inspection, one can recognize that books of hours and prayer scrolls contain carefully constructed narratives of bodily sin and salvation, significant as art and valuable for their capacity to convey both the personal concerns of their owners and the greater fears and desires of the cultural milieu that composed them.

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