For Kristin Uscinski, who is completing her doctorate in history this spring, these simple yet unusual mixtures can open doors into the lives of medieval women and their health care.

Uscinski has spent the last four years scouring through medieval medical recipe manuscripts, seeking to understand the major health complaints of women, the types of cures they sought, and how involved they were in their own healing practices.

The recipes she found revealed that medieval women were actively engaged in their own health care, both as professional practitioners and in their own homes, using botanicals that could be found in any domestic garden.

“From the beginning, when medicine is coming into its own as a profession in 12th-century Italy, women are there,” she said.

Supported by a Schallek Fellowship from the Medieval Academy of America and a Presidential Scholarship from Fordham, Uscinski travelled to England and studied more than 50 manuscripts, from the 12th through the early 16th centuries, at the British, Bodleian, and other libraries.

In order to fulfill her need for comparative and quantitative data, Uscinski used FileMaker Pro to create her own searchable database of about 2000 recipes.

The data she gathered showed that, not surprisingly, the most common complaints of women related to the reproductive system and childbirth.

What interested Uscinski, however, was how strongly her evidence pointed to women’s direct involvement in health care at home, making recipes in their own kitchens using techniques familiar to any cook.

“A lot of these recipes are very simple to make,” she said. “So if you can make tea and you can make soup, you can make these things.”

Charms, chants, and frog powder

Uscinski discovered that folkloric elements also made their way into the medical manuscripts— including charms, chants, and occasionally a frog powder or hare’s foot.

Though the effectiveness of the more eccentric recipes may be attributed to the placebo effect, she said, the other recipes appear to contain active ingredients more recognizable to a modern audience.

“When you see the same recipe 20 times there’s got to be a reason for it. I don’t think that they are just choosing these things at random,” she said.

She acknowledged, however, that testing the recipes is difficult, as there is no way to know if medieval ingredients correspond to the plants we know today.

Currently an adjunct professor of history at SUNY Purchase, Uscinski’s future plans include publishing her dissertation, which is titled Recipes for Women’s Healthcare in Medieval England.

Part of this work consists of her annotated transcription of a recipe collection called Isabella’s Book of Medicine, written for the wife of Edward II, which Uscinski would like to make more widely accessible.

She also hopes to put her searchable database online to help facilitate the work of others studying medieval medicine.

What motivates Uscinski’s ongoing work is her strong desire to help fill the gaps in medieval women’s history.

“Women can be remarkably difficult to see, especially in medieval sources, but they’re right there on the periphery. You have to look for them in a more creative way,” she said.

—Nina Heidig

But it’s just the sort of portrayal found in the Toledot Yeshu texts, Jewish narratives from the medieval and early modern periods that tell the story of Jesus’ life with a Jewish—and anti-Christian—twist.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., an assistant professor of theology, is researching these stories and believes that doing so can help foster interfaith dialogue and understanding. She said that, given the hostile climate in which Jews lived during the medieval period, the stories represent a textual response from a community frequently under physical or ideological threat.

“It’s often difficult to look at the histories of our traditions and identify where our narratives may have been offensive to others, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that such difficult moments existed in order to work toward more meaningful understanding and cooperation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” she said.

Some of the stories found in Toledot Yeshu don’t appear in the New Testament but do appear in Christian infancy gospels and the Qur’an, she said. One tale, for example, features a young Jesus transforming clay figures of birds into living creatures.

“Those who composed these editions of Toledot Yeshu don’t deny these miracles, rather they present them as an illicit form of magic,” said Kattan Gribetz. “Miracles are part of the way medieval Jews and Christians experienced and thought of the world. But the way that Jews refuted them was to say that Jesus’ miracles were the wrong kind of magic.”

In the texts, Jesus’ miracles take on a sinister twist, with the young prophet stealing the Tetragrammaton, the name of God, from the Jewish temple. He then cuts his thigh open, inserts the name into his wound, and escapes from the temple undetected. It is the Tetragrammaton, the text claims, that allows him to perform the illicit magic.

“In Toledot Yeshu, Jesus animates the birds on the Sabbath, so he’s also violating the holy day, another critique of his behavior,” she said.

Similarly, in some versions of Toledot Yeshu, Judas likewise steals the name of God and then challenges Jesus to an aerial battle. The two fly up into the sky and try to outdo one another’s magical abilities.

By the eighth or ninth centuries, the earliest versions of Toledot Yeshu had become a comprehensive story of Jesus’ life from birth to death, said Kattan Gribetz.

“It draws, as folklore often does, on traditions and ideas circulated orally and in written form in communities,” she said. “No one knows exactly where the earliest versions of the stories were written, or by whom.”

The texts of Toledot Yeshu, written at first in Aramaic and Hebrew, were translated into Latin, German, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Yiddish.  Some of the latest manuscripts resemble long-form novellas.

“They served different functions in each case that they were written and told,” she said. “But one of the reasons, in my opinion, is that Jews were attracted to Christianity, and retelling these stories was an effective strategy to convince Jews not to convert to the Christian faith.”

As a scholar of religion, Kattan Gribetz said she approaches the text more as a historian than as a theologian. Although she recognizes that her work can be controversial, she remains steadfast that it’s work that needs to be done.

“It’s not uncontroversial to write about a text that doesn’t portray Jews in the most positive light, poking fun at the beliefs of their Christian neighbors,” she said. “But a deeper historical perspective, one that takes into account both uplifting and challenging moments of religious diversity and conflict, is necessary if we are to work towards creating a more religiously tolerant society.”