Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps, by Jennifer Borland

Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps argues that medieval women displayed complicated agency in the household, a claim Jennifer Borland substantiates by analyzing historiated initials in several illuminated manuscripts of the Régime du corps. The Régime du corps (Regimen of the body) is a manual of health "best practices" (2) written and distributed between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The text is generally attributed to Aldobrandino of Siena, commissioned by Beatrice of Savoy and her daughters. Historiated initials are large, elaborately illuminated letters at the beginning of a section of text that generally represent a scene or a visual reference to a well-known story. Borland's writing deftly moves between a feminist analysis of power dynamics in medieval medicine and a lesson in art history.Chapter 1, "Visual Language," offers a close visual reading, asking how and why the initials communicate to their audiences. Borland argues that "the viewer of the Régime images becomes the composer of the narrative, specifically a health-related one, initiating action in a way analogous to enacting health care itself" (60). For example, in one section, the reader is presented with an analysis of various versions of vomit across Régime manuscripts in which each scene reproduces marginally different moments throughout the process of the medical event (39). In some scenes, the caregiver is shown administering the medicine to induce vomiting. In others, the caregiver is pictured cleaning and tending to the patient. Because the pictured figures take different kinds of actions, the user of the text can interpret and take advice from the narrative on the basis of the stage of the health event. The images were not always accompanied by instructional text, so it was up to the reader to decide how to proceed. If vomiting is being induced, a reader might choose to provide an emetic or simply leave the patient alone.Chapter 2, "The Illustrated Manuscripts and Their Audiences," explores both the intended and the incidental audience of the Régime du corps. Since Beatrice of Savoy and her four daughters were most likely the intended audience, these texts would have circulated widely among royal and royal-adjacent households in England and France. Borland asserts: "Access to learned knowledge was another commodity that symbolized status, and interest in this commodity was hardly limited to men" (92). Women holding copies of the Régime would have had access to specialized medical knowledge and, therefore, also medical agency.Chapter 3, "The Medical Context for the Régime du corps," relates the Régime to other medical writing at the time, offering a fascinating study of the professional, the personal, and the domestic medical spheres. For example, Borland points out that most households with access to elaborate books such as the Régime and other illustrated medical comportment texts would also have had access to well-regarded scientific professionals. Even so, ownership of a medical text also allowed the book owners to choose for themselves what kind of care might be best. "The lavishly illustrated copies of the Régime," concludes Borland, "may have served to facilitate the decision about when to take another route" (121). This conjecture allows readers to contemplate the complex rhetorical decisions made in medieval homes. Borland's analysis of the visual messages in the Régime demonstrates both the visibility of women in health care roles and women's remarkable agency.Where chapter 3 discusses the who of medieval medical care represented in visuals in the Régime, chapter 4 details the what. It asks what actions of care the characters of the illuminated initials perform. Borland paints a picture of an intimate household with no health secrets. The preparation of food, its consumption, and its eventual expulsion pictured in the Régime are all open and shared practices of a household, no matter the family status (153). Borland's inquiry into household dynamics demonstrates that all household members hold the ability to optimize or weaken household health but that, ultimately, the power to create optimal health lay in the hands of women. In this chapter, Borland argues that gender dynamics are the key to understanding care work in medieval households.Borland's insights into women's unconventional health authority in the household resembles Jamie White-Farnham, Bryna Siegel Finer, and Cathryn Malloy's concept of rhetorical ingenuity—"the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations" (2020, 2). Distinctively, Borland uses the Régime to demonstrate the active and technical role women assumed in medieval health care. Not only does the Régime represent a text commissioned by Beatrice of Savoy and circulated among other royal women; it places women at the center of rhetorically ingenious medical acts, including practices such as newborn care (43), cupping (59), healthy food preparation (83), and vomiting (126). It stops just short of naming these actions rhetorical.Although Visualizing Household Health does not explicitly connect to rhetoric, Borland explores several visual points of interest that would be exciting areas for further research, such as how medical practitioners' clothing style signified what kind of power they wielded (142), how the rhetorical use of touch or its omission affected patient and caregiver relationships (58), how a medieval household audience might respond to the Régime du corps and its potentially flipped power structures (138), how everyday hygiene was human-centered care (149), and how an audience-driven narrative of "possibility" influenced potential solutions to health problems (19). She also creates an intertextual dialogue between visuals, reminding us that health care also overlapped with the astrological (117) and the religious (118) spheres.As Borland points out, the historiated initials determine a rhetorical shift in the history of medicine. The medieval period marks a new emphasis on human-focused care of the body (16). While this shift is well illustrated by means of visuals, the book does not discuss modern echoes of those visuals and the practices illustrated. Visualizing Household Health is reminiscent of existing scholarship about the historical rhetorical body (Hawhee 2010; Selzer and Crowley 1999) and women's public bodies (Larson 2021; Werner 2020) and bodily identity (Chávez 2018; Olson 2013). Its subject text, the Régime du corps, could also be further analyzed by rhetoric scholars. Visualizing Household Health might additionally be useful to rhetoric scholars because of its historical evidence of graphic medicine—the use of comic-like visuals to communicate medical and health information. For example, in her edited anthology Graphic Reproduction (2018, 4), Jenell Johnson asserts that the instructional information that best communicates the complexities of health and medicine comes through pictures. Borland argues the same thing, but, instead of comics, she analyzes historiated initials (a form not dissimilar to comics).Borland transcends disciplinary boundaries to open up a conversation about health, medieval art, and the history of rhetoric. She designs a narrative created by the images in the Régime while putting women and practitioners in positions of medical agency and instruction. Her work demonstrates how medical images build the world of both medieval audiences and health practices of today by flipping traditional understandings of who has the power in health care. "The Régime's images," she contends, "provide a unique view of this expanded world of health care, broadening notions of medical community and asserting a more human-focused view of medicine based on the daily care of the body" (16). Along the way, her own work broadens our notions of rhetorical history and uses visuals to point to a shift in the history of medicine.