The Woman Thing: Gynecological Cures in Medieval Danish Medical Manuscripts

Abstract

A l t h o u g h m e d i e vA l g y n e c o l o g i c A l t e x t s are not perfect windows into the practice of women’s medicine in the past, they nonetheless can reveal encoded attitudes toward the female body. Gynecological texts combine ideas about nature, health, magic, and religion and draw from sources originating from all over Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Denmark did not produce any solely gynecological manuscripts in the Middle Ages; however, it did produce a number of more general medical texts that include a large number of gynecological cures. While medieval gynecological tracts in continental Europe have been studied extensively, the focus in Scandinavian research has largely been on other sources of knowledge about women’s health. There have been, for example, studies on the archaeological evidence for infanticide and death in childbirth, descriptions of birth and parental relationships in religious and miracle texts, discussions of the role of magic in birth, and examinations of depictions of birth in artworks and ballads.1 Grethe Jacobsen’s 1984 survey of possible sources for details on childbirth examines all of the above varieties of evidence. Yet in all these studies, very little attention has been paid to the presence of birth-related and gynecological cures in extant medieval medical texts. Despite her thorough accounting of other