ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Women, Miracles and Illness Narratives in Early Modern Spain

• In Event: Decentralizing Women’s Medicine: Plural Voices Describing Female Bodies in the Long Early Modern Period

English Abstract

Stories of miraculous healings contained in hagiographic texts and canonisation causes constitute a privileged source for studying the ways in which the sick coped with their illnesses. The rigour that saint-making processes acquired between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conferred a new value upon theological and medical justifications, which were required to define very clearly the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. In this context, physicians, surgeons, and other experts played a key role in ensuring the legitimacy of healing miracles. Yet the afflicted themselves undertook essential epistemological work in describing how illness had manifested in their bodies and what kinds of therapeutic decisions they had taken. This source is particularly important for recovering women’s voices within an approach—the patient’s perspective—that has not paid enough attention to female testimonies. Moreover, the specificity of the documentation allows for a deeper exploration of the relationships between science and religion, giving particular consideration to the combination of different therapeutic remedies (medical, empirical, and devotional) in the pursuit of health.
To address this issue, this contribution draws upon the testimonies made by several women from the city of Madrid in the beatification process of the devout laywoman Mariana de Jesús in the early seventeenth century. In so doing, it examines how they described the course of their illness in their bodies, the emotions they experienced, the use of devotional objects, their relationship with the living saint and, above all, their active role in producing medical knowledge.

Author

• Laura Guinot-Ferri, University of Valencia