The Image of the Female Healer in Western Vernacular Literature of the Middle Ages

Abstract

This article examines the image of the female healer in a variety of western medieval secular literary texts. Whilst many depictions of the female healer corroborate the findings of recent studies of women's medical practice, the occasional divergences shed light on changes in cultural, religious and societal values. An advantage to viewing female healers in a literary context is the ability it affords the reader to observe her in her total context—as a physician, but also as a wife, possibly a mother, a queen or a member of a village. In each of these situations, a woman's healing is depicted as an innate quality of her femininity. The work of the female healer is at once natural and aberrant. Her literary image serves not only to elucidate those qualities, but also shows how the balance and value of them shift in response to changing social, economic and religious paradigms.

Literature, medieval, female healers, magic, learning