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Darrera modificació: 2019-02-25
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Skinner, Patricia, "Marking tahe face, curing the soul? Reading the disfigurament of women in later Middle Ages", dins: Yoshikawa, Naoë Kukita (ed.), Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer (Gender in the Middle Ages, 11), 2015, pp. 181-202.
- Resum
- This chapter, however, explores a series of contradictions inherent in high- and late-medieval responses to women's facial disfigurement, as presented in three works of hagiography. Deriving almost entirely from texts recording the male gaze, it considers the troubled relationship between women's beauty and their spiritual health. Religious texts, in particular, present the abnegation and destruction of a beautiful face, through often drastic, physical injury, as one option available to women in search of salvation, although such mutilation in secular life had quite different meaning, as we shall see. Throughout, therefore, the chapter will move between the fleshly reality of the wounded or damaged face, and the possibilities that existed, within medical and surgical fields, for its care; and the concerns of the victims and observers for their spiritual health, and how this might be assisted, or not, by bearing their physical deformities or even self-inflicting them. Whilst a damaged face might represent the threat of social disability – the removal of beauty tantamount to destroying a woman's chances of marriage (a theme implicit in the responses of the saint's family members), the texts themselves do not explore the potential for permanent, physical impairment. The tense relationship between religion and medicine is revealed in hagiographic texts, whilst gender clearly played a part in the ways hagiographers constructed their stories of the mutilations themselve
- Matèries
- Dones
Religió - Hagiografia
Medicina - Ginecologia, obstetrícia i cosmètica
- URL
- http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt13wwzh3
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK311275/
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