Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jmedhist.2008.03.007

1873-1279

Carmen Caballero Navas,

History of Medicine Studies

Abstract In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge. Keywords: Jewish-Christian relationsMedieval womenHealth careDecoration of the bodyGynaecologyFemale authority Acknowledgements I am indebted to Monica Green, who invited me to participate in a panel on ‘Conversing with the minority: relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women (a roundtable discussion)’ that she organized at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Kalamazoo, MI, in 2005. Her constructive criticism and her comments on my work have greatly contributed to this article. I am also grateful to Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, who is a constant source of inspiration, and to whom I dedicate this article. Parts of earlier versions of this essay were presented for discussion at the international conference ‘Recipes in Early Medicine: The Production of Medicine, Food and Knowledge’, held in Oxford in 2004, and at the III Jornadas de Cultura Judía de la Asociación Española de Estudios Hebreos y Judíos (AEEHJ), held in Segovia (Spain) in 2005. I have developed my research for this article within the framework and with the support of the research project ‘Lengua y literatura del judaismo clásico: rabínico y medieval’ (BFF2003-08590), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education. Notes 1 Monica Green, Women's healthcare in the medieval west: texts and contexts (Aldershot, 2000); Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘“Como una madre, como una hija”: las mujeres y los cuidados de salud en la Baja Edad Media’, in: Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina: de la prehistoria a la Edad Media, ed. I. Morant and E. Cantarino (Madrid, 2005), 637–57; Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘Femmes médecins au moyen âge. Témoignages sur leurs pratiques (1250–1359)’, in: Histoire et société. Mélanges offerts à Georges Duby, Vol. I (Aix-en-Provence, 1992), 167–75 and, Jews, medicine and medieval society (Berkeley and London, 1994), especially at 108–12. 2 Instances of attribution of authorship to anonymous women have been documented by Monserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Autoras sin nombre, autoridad femenina (s. XIII)’, in: Las sabias mujeres II (siglos III–XVI). Homenaje a Lola Luna, ed. M.M. Graña (Madrid, 1995), 59–73; Monica Green, The Trotula. A medieval compendium of women's medicine (Philadelphia, 2001), 48–51; and Carmen Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love and Jewish medieval medical literature on women. Sefer ahavat nashim (London, 2004), 35 and 40. 3 Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Como una madre, como una hija’, especially 638. 4 See Elka Klein, Jews, Christian society, and royal power in medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor, 2006); David Nirenberg, Communities of violence. Persecution of minorities in the middle ages (Princeton, 1996) and ‘Conversion, sex, and segregation. Jews and Christians in medieval Spain’, American Historical Review, 107:4 (2002), 1065–93. 5 See Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish law. The essential texts, their history, and their relevance for today, rev. edn (New York, 1995). 6 See Shatzmiller, Jews, medicine. For an update of the state-of-the-art see Carmen Caballero-Navas, ‘Medicine among medieval Jews: the science, the art, and the practice’, in: Science in medieval Jewish cultures, ed. G. Freudenthal (Leiden, forthcoming). 7 See Antonio Cardoner Planas, ‘Seis mujeres hebreas practicando la medicina en el Reino de Aragón’, Sefarad, 9 (1949), 441–5; Harry Friedenwald, ‘Jewish doctoresses in the middle ages’, in: The Jews and medicine (Baltimore, 1944; repr. from Medical Pickwick, 6, (1920), 217–20); Ladislao Münster, ‘Medichesse italiane dal XIII al XV secolo’, Lo Smeraldo (Milan, 1952), 1–11; Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘Femmes médecins’ and Jews, medicine, 108–12; Elisheva Baumgarten, ‘“Thus sayeth the wise midwives”: midwives and midwifery in thirteenth century Ashkenaz’ [Hebrew], Zion, 65:1 (2000), 45–74; and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and children. Jewish family life in medieval Europe (Princeton and Oxford, 2004). 8 See Luis García-Ballester, Michael McVaugh and Augustín Rubio-Vela, ‘Medical licensing and learning in fourteenth-century Valencia’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 79:6 (1989), i–vii, 1–128 (28). The authors bring to light a 1342 document in which the king agreed with Astruga, a Jewish female surgeon from Barcelona, that she did not need to undergo an examination since she practised only amongst Jews. 9 See Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘On becoming a Jewish doctor in the high middle ages’, Sefarad, 43 (1983), 239–50 and Jews, medicine, 14–27; Caballero-Navas, ‘Medicine among medieval Jews’. 10 See Cardoner Planas, ‘Seis mujeres hebreas’, 444. 11 See Shatzmiller, ‘On becoming’, 247–8, where he describes a contract from 1326 in Marseille established between a Jewish woman, Sara de Sancto Aegidio, and her male apprentice, whom she agrees to train in the art of medicine. 12 Montserrat Cabré has contributed a very useful classification of the four different contexts in which health activities of Iberian women can be documented. See Cabré, ‘Como una madre, como una hija’, 641–7. Sporadic references to particular Jewish midwives and healers appear in a wide range of scholarly works, whose authors have found them when navigating archival sources. 13 Monica H. Green and Daniel Lord Smail, ‘The trial of Floreta d'Ays (1403): Jews, Christians, and obstetrics in later medieval Marseille’, in this issue. 14 See Cardoner Planas, ‘Seis mujeres hebreas’. The women listed in this pioneering article, and the circumstances of their practice, are well-known examples, profusely quoted in scholarly bibliography since its publication. 15 See Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘Médecins municipaux en Provence, Catalogne et autres régions de l'Europe méridionale (1350–1400)’, in: Les Sociétés urbaines en France méridionale et en Péninsule Ibérique au moyen âge (Paris, 1991), 329–36, at 332; and Caballero-Navas, ‘Medicine among medieval Jews’. 16 See Monica Green, ‘Documenting medieval women's medical practice’, in Practical medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. García-Ballester et al. (Cambridge, 1994), 322–52 and ‘Women's medical practice and health care in medieval Europe’, Signs, 14 (1989), 434–73. Both have been reprinted in Green, Women's healthcare, as essays I and II. See also her ‘Bodies, gender, health and disease: recent work on medieval women's medicine’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, 2 (2005), 1–46, at 12–17. 17 See Cabré, ‘Como una madre, como una hija’; Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and society in later medieval England, new edn (London, 1999), 182–6; and Cynthia Ann Anderson, ‘“With her own hands”: household instructional texts and the medieval and renaissance woman’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Texas University, 2000), 175–225. 18 Quoted by Cabré, ‘Como una madre, como una hija’, 637–8. 19 Juan Luis Vives, De Institutione feminae christianae (1523) Liber secundus, 147, quoted by Anderson, ‘With her own hands’, 209–10. 20 In fact, when he explains in Book I of his manual that a woman should herself prepare the food whenever a member of the family was sick, he asserts, ‘I have personally seen here and in Spain and France those who have recovered from illness through the food cooked by their wives, daughters, or daughters-in-law […];’ Liber primus, 25, quoted by Anderson, ‘With her own hands’, 204. 21 See above n. 19. 22 See Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Autoras sin nombre, autoridad femenina’. 23 See above n. 2. 24 Quoted by Katherine Park, ‘Medicine and magic: the healing arts’, in: Gender and society in Renaissance Italy, ed. J.C. Brown and R.C. Davis (London and New York, 1998), 129–49, at 138. 25 See Helen Rodnite Lemay, ‘Anthonius Guainerius and medical gynecology’, in: Women of the medieval world: essays in honor of John H. Mundy, ed. J. Kirshner and S.F. Wemple (Oxford, 1985), 317–36, especially at 326–7. 26 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Oppenheim 180 (Cat. 2134), f. 43r, 48v and 51v, regarding uterine frenzy, itching in the genitalia and swelling of the breasts, respectively. 27 Patricia Skinner, ‘“The light of my eyes”: medieval motherhood in the Mediterranean’, Women's History Review, 6:3 (1997), 391–409, at 393. 28 Recent research in this field in the Latin medical tradition is certainly abundant. See especially the bibliography by Green and Cabré cited in this article, with particular attention to Green's recently published state-of-the-art, ‘Bodies, gender, health and disease’. On the production and diffusion of this kind of literature in Hebrew see Ron Barkai, A history of Jewish gynaecological texts in the middle Ages (Leiden, 1998) and Les infortunes de Dinah, ou la gynécologie juive au moyen âge (Paris, 1991, translation into French of the Hebrew text by Michel Garel); Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love and ‘Algunos ‘secretos de mujeres’ revelados. El Še'ar yašub y la recepción y transmisión del Trotula en hebreo’, Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, 55 (2006), 381–425 and ‘Secrets of women. Naming sexual difference in medieval Hebrew medical literature’, NASHIM, A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, 12 (2006), 39–56. 29 See Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘From a master to a laywoman: a feminine manual of self-help’, Dynamis, 20 (2000), 371–93. 30 Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love. 31 Anonymous, L'ornement des dames (Ornatus mulierum), ed. Pierre Ruelle (Brussels, 1967); Montserrat Cabré i Pairet has studied in depth the attributions to women of some of its remedies in ‘Autoras sin nombre’. 32 Cabré i Pairet, ‘Autoras sin nombre’, 66. 33 See I. Grunfeld, The Jewish dietary laws (New York, 1972). 34 For an interesting discussion on the patterns of translation into Hebrew of medical advice that was incompatible with the Jewish religion, such as the consumption of forbidden food, see Yoseph Ziegler, ‘Steinschneider (1816–1907) revised: on the translation of medical writing from Latin into Hebrew’, Medieval Encounters, 3:1 (1997), 94–102. 35 Carmen Caballero-Navas, ‘Un capítulo sobre mujeres: transmisión y recepción de nociones sobre salud femenina en la producción textual hebrea durante la Edad Media’, Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, 52 (2003), 133–60. 36 See Shatzmiller, Jews, medicine, 120–3. 37 Green, ‘Bodies, gender, health and disease’, 3. 38 Manual de mugeres en el qual se contienen muchas y diversas reçeutas muy buenas, ed. Alicia Martínez Crespo (Salamanca, 1996). 39 Late medieval Hebrew and Castilian satirical literatures are rich in allusions to certain personages' ‘blackness’, in an attempt to insult them and stress their low moral values. For Castilian literature, see J. Rodríguez Puertolas, Poesía crítica y satírica del s. XV (Madrid, 1981); and the fourteenth-century Juan Ruiz (Arcipreste de Hita), Libro de Buen Amor, one of whose main feminine characters is named Doña Endrina (de Calatayud), after a small dark fruit. For Hebrew examples see Arturo Prats Oliván, ‘Secciones en Prosa en el Diwan de Shelomo bar Re'uben Bonafed (s. XIV–XV)’ 2 vols (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2004), vol. 1 (Spanish translation), 303, 327, 328, 390 and 430. Monica Green has also discussed the issue of the colouring of the hair in an interesting essay on documenting differences and similarities in appearance of women, based in her study of the Salernitan De ornatu mulierum, which circulated widely during the middle ages independently and as part of compilation known as Trotula. I am indebted to her for allowing me to use her unpublished manuscript, ‘Is it true blondes have more fun? The aesthetics of the twelfth-century Salernitan De ornatu mulierum’. 40 See Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love, 124–6 and ‘Algunos ‘secretos de mujeres’ revelados'. Most of the contents of the She'ar yashuv are not original, but portions from the Hebrew translation of two of the three treatises that made up the famous medieval Latin compilation Trotula: the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum and the De ornatu mulierum. In fact, its remedies to whitening the skin are versions of recipes found in De ornatu. See the footnotes to the translation, where I compare both versions, 410–11. 41 See Sami Hamarneh, ‘The first known independent treatise on cosmetology in Spain’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 39 (1965), 309–25; Concepción Vazquez de Benito, ‘Sobre la cosmética (zīna) del siglo XIV en al-Andalus’, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Farmacia, 129 (1984), 9–47; and Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Cosmética y perfumería en la Castilla bajomedieval,’ in: Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la Corona de Castilla, vol. II, Edad Media, ed. Luís García-Ballester (Valladolid, 2002), 772–9. 42 Monica Green has also documented cross-cultural interaction regarding the use of depilatories in twelfth-century southern Italy. See her ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’. 43 Sumptuary norms were mainly aimed at social and class differentiation. However, the very wording of the decrees, and the extension devoted to regulate women's apparel, identify them as their main addressees. See José Hinojosa Montalvo, ‘La mujer en las Ordenanzas Municipales en el Reino de Valencia durante la Edad Media’, in: Las mujeres en las ciudades medievales, ed. C. Segura Graiño (Madrid, 1990), 43–55, at 45–8. Moreover, the deeper impact that sumptuary laws had upon women's lives can be measured by the responses that these decrees prompted from them. Fray Hernando de Talavera, who in 1477 wrote a moral treatise in response to the loud opposition that the enactment of sumptuary laws had aroused in Valladolid, emphasised that it was women who had expressed more intensely their disagreement. In fifteenth-century Bologna, Nicolosa Sanuti also expressed her disagreement with the sumptuary laws that Cardinal Bessario had decreed by sending him an epistle entitled Ut matronis ornamenta restituantur. See, respectively, Teresa de Castro, ‘El tratado sobre el vestir, calzar y comer del arzobispo Hernando de Talavera’, Revista Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie III, Historia Medieval, 14 (2001), 11–99; and Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘La cura del cos femení i la medicina medieval de tradició llatina. Els tractas De ornatu, De decorationibus mulierum atribuïts a Arnau de Vilanova, Trótula de mestre Joan, i Flos del tresor de beutat atribuït a Manuel Díeç de Calatayud’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad de Barcelona, 1994, Collecció de tesis microfitxades num. 2794, 1996), 155–6. 44 Fontes iudaeorum Regni Castellae, V. De iure hispano-hebraico, las taqqanot de Valladolid de 1432. Un estatuto comunal renovador, ed. Yolanda Moreno Koch (Salamanca, 1987), 92–7. They were written in Castilian with Hebrew letters in order to be understood by all members of the Castilian Jewry. Note that the list of forbidden adornments for women is much longer than the list for men. Jacob R. Marcus included a partial English translation of the taqqanah in his The Jew in the medieval world. A source book: 315–1791, rev edn (Cincinnati, 1990), 194, from which he omitted the opening, where the reason for its issuing was expressed, as well as the section where women's clothing is regulated, without indicating his omission. 45 See Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘Soins de beauté, image et image de soi: le cas des juifs du moyen âge’, in: Les soins de beauté. Moyen âge, début des temps modernes. Actes du IIIe colloque international Grasse (1985) (Nice, 1987), 51–60. I would add, however, a third goal that consists in imposing and reinforcing a model of sexuality based in heterosexual practices, as the nature of this exemption shows. For a discussion on this idea see Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love, 74-5. 46 See Jonathan Ray, ‘Beyond tolerance and persecution: reassessing our approach to medieval Convivencia’, Jewish Social Studies, 11:2 (2005), 1–18, especially at10, where he stresses that Jewish leaders denounced the assumption of Christian dress as an attempt to hide Jewish religious identity from gentiles. 47 I am indebted to Arturo Prats who called my attention to Bonafed's words and their relation to some of the attitudes of the representatives of the Jewish communities discussed here. See Arturo Prats Oliván, ‘Secciones en Prosa en el Diwan de Shelomo bar Re'uben Bonafed’, vol. 1 (Spanish translation), 410 and vol. 2 (Hebrew edition), 173. 48 See Monica Green, ‘Editor's preface,’ above, and her ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’. 49 All in all, this might have been considered a less problematic outcome of acculturation than the occasional breakage of dietary laws discussed above. For a survey of Iberian medieval attire see Carmen Bernis, Trajes y modas en la España de los Reyes Católicos, 2 vols (Madrid, 1978) and Indumentaria medieval española (Madrid, 1955), where she discusses in detail garments, headdresses, shoes, accessories, fabrics, fashions and their changes. 50 See Merche Oses, ‘La imagen en la historia: el studio del vestido en la edad media’, Congreso Internacional de Historia. Fuentes orales y visuales, investigación histórica y renovación pedagógica (Pamplona, 2005); and Martha Driver, ‘Re-considering images of medieval women’, in: Women and the book: assessing the visual evidence, ed. J.H.M. Taylor and L. Smith (London and Toronto, 1997). 51 See Hispano-Moresque Haggadah, Castile, c.1300 (London, British Library, MS Or. 2737); Golden Haggadah, Catalonia, c. 1320 (London, British Library, MS Add. 27210); Haggadah of Sarajevo, Aragon 1350 (Bosnia National Museum, Sarajevo); Haggadah of Barcelona, Barcelona, c. 1350-1360 (London, British Library, MS Add. 14761). 52 Of the abundant Christian sources available, I have relied mainly on Catalan gothic painting, and for Castile, on the Cantigas de Santa Maria. See Cristina Sigüenza, ‘La vida cotidiana en la Edad Media: la moda en el vestir en la pintura gótica’, in: La vida cotidiana en la Edad Media (VIII Semana de Estudios medievales, Najera, 1997), 353-363 and La moda en el vestir en la pintura gótica aragonesa (Zaragoza, 2000); Alfonso X, el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María. Madrid, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, Códice T.I.1; and The cantigas de Santa Maria database, Centre for the Study of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, Oxford University, , accessed 21 December 2007. 53 Other Jewish males are less strongly characterised. Some of them have beards, which is also a feature of Christian pilgrims in some Cantigas (49), or hoods, which also some young Christian males wear (24). 54 Regarding exemptions to physicians see Shatzmiller, ‘Médecins municipaux’, 332; and Asunción Blasco, ‘Médicos y pacientes de las tres religions (Zaragoza s. XIV y comienzos del XV)’, Aragón en la Edad Media, 12 (1995), 153–82, especially at 160, where she records a royal privilege granted in 1381 to Ezra Alazar, son the prestigious physician from Saragossa Mosé Alazar and a student of medicine himself, which released him from wearing the distinctive mark of the wheel. A. I. Burns has found a curious charter from thirteenth-century Valencia, which documents the permission granted to a Jewish woman to wear dresses of any cloth, except scarlet Persian (probably because it was a very expensive fabric usually worn by nobility), even against decrees that might be enacted by authorities of her own community. See A.I. Burns, ‘Women in crusader Valencia: a five-year core sample, 1265–1270’, Medieval Encounters, Special issue of Women in Medieval Catalonia, 12 (2006), 37–47, at 45. 55 Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Distinguishing signs: ear–rings, Jews and Franciscan rhetoric in the Italian renaissance city’, Past and Present, 112:1 (1986), 3–59. 56 Victoria Hoyle, ‘The bonds that bind’, 00. 57 Asunción Blasco, ‘‘Ebreismo’ sinónimo de judería’, Sefarad, 41:1 (1981), 111–13. The author edits and discusses a Latin document from 1332 in which King Alfonso IV of Aragon grants permission to Jewish artisans from Zaragoza to establish their shops out of the Jewish quarter. He apparently wished to appease discontent aroused by a previous regulation that barred Christian women entrance to the Jewish quarter. 58 On Christian women as borrowers of consumption loans from Jewish women see the Editor's Preface to this volume as well as the contributions by Charlotte Newman Goldy, ‘A thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman crossing boundaries: visible and invisible’, and Victoria Hoyle, ‘The bonds that bind’. 59 See Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and children and ‘Thus sayeth the wise midwives’. 60 See above n. 7; María del Carmen García Herrero, Las mujeres en Zaragoza en el siglo XV (Zaragoza, 1990), 43–44; and Encarnación Marín Padilla, ‘Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: enfermedades y muertes’, Sefarad, 43:12 (1983), 251–344, at 257, 274, 281, 283–4. 61 On recent research on the medieval iconography of childbirth see Green, ‘Bodies, gender, health and disease’, 23. 62 Haggadah of Sarajevo, f. 9v. 63 See Barkai, Les infortunes de Dinah. The caption at the back cover of the book identifies this illustration as a Jewish woman in childbirth helped by two Christian midwives. 64 See Baumgarten, ‘Thus sayeth the wise midwives’. 65 Either separately or in the form of a compendium, they were the most widely circulating texts on women's healthcare from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. See Green, The Trotula. I have recently identified some hitherto unknown fragments of the Hebrew translation from the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum, and from De ornatu mulierum. See my ‘Algunos secretos de mujeres revelados’. 66 I am deeply indebted to Monica Green, who disclosed this information to me and generously shared with me her work-in-progress. In a previous publication, which conveyed her extensive search for textual sources for all the component parts of the Trotula, she noted, regarding this paragraph, that it has only vague similarities to Muscio's Gynaecia, which did not include specification of the types of oils to be used. See ‘The ‘development’ of the Trotula', Revue d'Historie des Textes, 26 (1996), 119–203. In a personal communication she has informed me that further work on this material has allowed her to trace this textual parallel. The earliest manuscript of this treatise is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 567, s. XII1 (England), f. 65v. 67 This rendition is very much in consonance with that of an early thirteenth-century French translation of the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum that does not translates Latin obstetrix, but simply states ‘a woman’. Monica Green notes this translator's choice in the context of an interesting discussion on the lack of evidence for midwives and the development of midwifery into a professional occupation for women during the middle ages. See Green, ‘Bodies, gender, health, and disease’, 14–17. In my view, the fact that neither version translated the category obstetrix to identify the practice of these women might be explained according to an argument developed by Montserrat Cabré, who has demonstrated that the word ‘woman’, and other words belonging to the same semantic field, were used during the late middle ages in relation to the knowledge and practices related to health care and to the attention to childbirth. See Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Nacer en relación’, in: De dos en dos. Las prácticas de creación y recreación de la vida y la convivencia humana, ed. Marta Bertrán et al. (Madrid, 2000), 15–32. 68 For example, in Bernard of Gordon's Lilium medicinae. See Bernard of Gordon, Lilio de medicina. Un manual básico de medicina medieval. Edición crítica de la versión española Sevilla 1495, ed. John Cull and Brian Dutton (Madison, 1991), 1516. This work was translated into Hebrew at least twice, by Moshe ben Shemuel in 1360 (Seville) and by Yequtiel ben Salomon of Narbona in 1387. See Lola Ferre, ‘Las traducciones hebreas de la obra médica de Bernardo de Gordon’, Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, 49 (2000), 191–205. Also the fourteenth-century Jewish Castilian author, Meir Aldabi, stressed in his Shevilei emunah (Paths of Faith) that a good midwife should have ‘lean hands and long fingers’. See Meir Aldabi, Shevilei emunah (Warsaw, 1887), sign 5, part I, 112–13. 69 See Barkai, A history of Jewish gynaecological texts, 195 (Hebrew) and 204 (English). 70 See Park, ‘Medicine and magic’; Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the middle ages (Cambridge and New York, 1989); and Jeffrey Spiers, ‘Medieval Byzantine magical amulets and their tradition’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993), 25–62. 71 See Caballero-Navas, The Book of women's love, 49–63 and ‘Magia: experiencia femenina y práctica de la relación’, in: De dos en dos. Las prácticas de creación y recreación de la vida y la convivencia humana, ed. Marta Bertrán et al. (Madrid, 2000), 33–54; Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Uterine amulets and Greek uterine medicine’, Medicina nei secoli, 7:2 (1995), 281–99; Raquel Martín Sánchez, ‘Hechiceras en la Colima Novohispana: en busca de una genealogía femenina de la práctica médica’, Duoda, 29 (2005), 33–59; and Amos Megged, ‘Magic, popular medicine and gender in seventeenth-century Mexico: the case of Isabel de Montoya’, Social History, 19 (1994), 189–207. 72 C. Robertson, Materials for history of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, ed. C. Robertson, 7 vols (London, 1875–85), vol. 2, 7. cited in: The Jews of Angevin England: documents and records, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, 1893), 153 and scanned by Elka Klein for Internet Medieval Source Book , accessed 21 December 2007. 73 Barcelona, Arxiu Diocesá, U.P vol I/1, f. 11v, quoted by J.M. Martí i Bonet, L. Niqui i Puigvert, and F. Miquel i Marcort, Processos de l'Arxiu diocesà de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1984). 74 Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, ‘Medieval women's writing in Catalan: textual inscriptions of feminine authority’, La Corónica. A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature, 32:1 (2003), 23–41, at 24.