Jennifer Borland

Author of "Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps"

January 10, 2022

Dr. Jennifer Borland is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Graphic Design, and Art History, Director of OSU’s Humanities Initiative, and a core faculty member in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. She is also the managing co-editor of the online, open-access journal "Different Visions: New Perspectives in Medieval Art," and a co-founder of the scholarly collaborative group, the Material Collective. A specialist in medieval art history, her new book is titled "Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps."

In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Régime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly 70 surviving copies made over the next 200 years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Régime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Régime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients’ consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these images provide important details about the nature of women’s agency in the home—and offer highly compelling evidence that women enacted multiple types of health care.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2022-honorees/jennifer-borland

Last Updated: 11 January 2022