[Sca-cooks] Foods for Invalids

[Johnna Holloway]

More from another review

Extract
Vaughan has written an excellent book for everyone interested in Medical Anthropology and Women’s Studies. This time, Vaughan focuses on the intersection among women, medieval theories of nutrition and health and culture around food. Divided in nine chapters, the book starts by underlining the strong relationship between women and provisions. Mothers breast fed their children, meaning that their diet (or wetnurses’ regime) was important for both women and babies. Housewives cared for their families using herbs and diet, and therefore possessed some kind of knowledge or beliefs around foodstuffs. Some women worked as midwives or physicians and recommended specific regimes for their patients. Likewise, there was female presence in the production, distribution and preparation of foodstuffs and, as a result, in the Middle Ages women were essential in every aspect around food.
However, written sources from a female point of view are scarce because in the Middle Ages most women were illiterate. Thus, Vaughan thinks that an anthropological perspective can be useful for historians and asserts that ‘folklorists and anthropologists know that theories of medicine (and the role of food within folk medicine) are pervasive, sometimes borrowing from a written tradition, but also influencing that tradition’ (p. 48). In other words, women could change ideas around food in a deeper way than has been studied until now.

> On Jan 10, 2023, at 9:27 PM, Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> The book that comes to mind would be 
> 
> Women, Food, and Diet in the 
> <https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9462989389/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1>Theresa A. Vaughan, Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages. Balancing the Humours. Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press,  2020. Pp. 236. €198. ISBN 978-9-4629-8938-2.
> 
> What can anthropological and folkloristic approaches to food, gender, and medicine tell us about these topics in the Middle Ages beyond the textual evidence itself? Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours uses these approaches to look at the textual traditions of dietary recommendations for women’s health, placed within the context of the larger cultural concerns of gender roles and Church teachings about women. Women are expected to be nurturers, healers, and the primary locus of food provisioning for families, especially women of the lower social classes, typically overlooked in the written record. This work illuminates what we can know about women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages, and examines how the written medical tradition interacts with folk medicine and other cultural factors in both understanding women’s bodies and their roles as healers and food providers.
> 
> Terribly expensive. It’s a book which comes with a payment plan. 
> 
> Johnna
> 
>> 
>> Greetings Cooks!
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I have long been interested in the sections of period cooking and medicinal
>> writings aimed at foods for the infirm.  Having just been diagnosed with a
>> gastric infirmity of my own, it is of even more interest than before.  :/
>> 
>> For example, many of the early mentions of gruel are in medical treatises
>> that recommended it as food for invalids because it was nourishing and easy
>> to digest.
>> 
>> (My personal needs are currently for low-fiber foods, so broth is better for
>> me currently than gruel J )
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I'm interested in seeing what various cultures consider healing foods.   I'd
>> like to know what is said about seasonality and humoral influences, among
>> others.
>> 
>> What would your persona feed to an invalid?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Christianna, who is missing oatmeal something fierce
>> 
> 
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