The Mobile Woman: Getting Around during the 1630 Plague in Bologna

Legal proclamations show that during the 1630 plague outbreak in Bologna, Italy, women were required to remain quarantined in their homes for the duration of the epidemic while men remained mobile. However, primary texts and visual sources demonstrate that despite these legal restrictions, women remained active players in the fight against the plague by circumventing regulations. Significantly, women played a key role in sustaining the Bolognese economy, in particular by travelling to work in the silk industry. Moreover, while male doctors enjoyed special dispensations to avoid visiting the sick directly, female nurses left their homes to care for the daily needs of patients in the lazzaretto, the plague hospital. Artworks and primary texts depict a mobile woman. They show women from the poorest of backgrounds who were compelled to move through the city’s public spaces, remaining active in the street life of the plagued city. For instance, along with unlicensed women healers and nuns, prostitutes commonly volunteered for service in the plague hospitals. This required a brief shift in the social status of these women as they moved from their brothels to the pestilent walls of the lazzaretto. This paper will address the contribution that these resilient women made to maintaining the family economy and the significant positions women held in administering care, which have been overlooked in the scholarship. It will argue that by performing these essential activities, Bolognese women enjoyed an increase in physical but also social mobility, albeit short-lived.

Women and Medicine in Early America

Women from all cultural groups in British North America—European, African, and Indigenous American—played a central role in medicine in early America. They acted as midwives, healers, and apothecaries and drew on a variety of cultural traditions in doing so, even as they shared many beliefs about the workings of the human body. Healing gave women a route to authority and autonomy within their social groups. As the 18th century opened, women healers were able to enter the expanding world of capitalist commerce. Anglo-American women parlayed their knowledge of herbal medicine into successful businesses, and even enslaved midwives were sometimes able to be paid in cash for their skills. However, as academic medicine took more of an interest in topics such as childbirth, women practitioners faced increasingly bitter competition from professionalizing male physicians.

Are Dalit Women Healers Allowed to Claim “Tradition”?

This essay uses Dalit women’s mediumship as a healing tradition that provides something of a “limit situation” from which to review basic assumptions about the varied ways in which we can understand what it is to “have” tradition—as an acquisition and inheritance that Dalit women enjoy like everyone else, but also as formal claims to value and recognition that are largely denied to Dalit women. Comparing Dalit women healers with male performers in ritual theater and more privileged healers in rural Tamil Nadu, the essay addresses dimensions of inequality comparatively neglected in studies of tradition as either constructed or invented within modernity. The essay moves us away from discussions of tradition that center on conscious claims to a consideration of the elements that mean that some traditions may never reach the level of being articulated as claims, let alone achieve recognition.

“When spotted deaths ran arm’d through every street”: Women-Healers and the Great Plague in Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders

In the late 1600s, England was reeling under the recurrence of the pandemic that had swept continent-wide in the 14th century. However, it was not the only disease lurking around. At the heels of the scarlet-ringed Black Death, came the scarlet letter of witchcraft accusations, mostly geared towards Wise Women in the margins of society- women who exhibited knowledge and skill in medicine, herbal remedies and midwifery. Set in the time when religious fanaticism and Puritanical fear-mongering was at its height, Year of Wonders presents before us an opportunity to delve into the web of lies and life-threatening allegations that formed the bedrock of the English witch trials continuing in full swing since the incursion of Continental lore ever since James I came to power. Furthermore, with midwives and female herbalists in the area falling prey to targeted sexual and physical violence in the wake of the pandemic in the story, what needs to be inspected is the inescapable link between Church-backed patriarchy’s delusional fear, jealousy and consequent scapegoating of the economically and socio-sexually marginalized woman-healers in the countryside and the failure of the male-dominated medical field in effectively containing the spread of the virus. The paper investigates further the generational flow of biomedical wisdom in a female-oriented domain which becomes significant in the presentation of the two female leads inheriting the function of the Wise Women from the original holders of the position, thus solidifying the sense of found family and sisterhood standing against the mounting social pressure to bend to the will of the Church and the men in their lives.