Sara Ritchey
Associate Professor of History
Affiliated Faculty, Religious Studies
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
My research interrogates medieval intellectual categories such as nature, the body, medicine, and matter in order to reveal how individuals sorted, valued, and regulated their world. At the same time, I am interested in how these medieval constructions continue to resonate in contemporary statements of value, aesthetics, and social regulation. I often approach medieval intellectual and cultural history through the prism of Christian devotion, which captures lived experiences of mingled conceptual categories such as human and divine, self and absolute other, death and resurrection, time and eternity.
Medieval constructions of what we now call “nature” formed the subject of my first monograph, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell University Press, 2014). While scholars have long posited a sudden “discovery of nature” to explain the twelfth-century proliferation of herbal, floral, and arboreal iterations of labor, art, and prayer, my attention to distinctions between medieval, modern, and post-modern uses of the term “nature” showed that the historically shifting contents of this category had obscured our interpretation of medieval devotional practice and of the aims of religious communities. Instead of valuing the abstract concept of nature, the book demonstrates that a range of sources including theological treatises, agricultural projects, architectural plans, and manuscript illustrations reflect that later medieval Christians began to conceptualize the doctrine of the incarnation of their God as a fundamental transformation in the substance of the world’s material so that it might be inclusive of, susceptible to, divinity. A flurry of new devotional practices and forms of religious organization transpired as a result of this emerging doctrine of the world’s re-creation. Holy Matter provides an alternative narrative through which to interpret those new practices and communities; rather than seeing late medieval devotion as inspired by the suffering and passion of an incarnate God, the book demonstrates that we must consider religious change at this time in terms of a desire for presence, access, and divine abundance.
My current book project, entitled 'Salvation is Medicine': Gender and the Healing Communities of Late Medieval Europe, examines the place of the passions in medical, hagiographic, and theological discussions of the human body and its processes of healing. Affective healing remedies included prayers, charms, songs, and other narrations that worked to prepare the sick petitioner-- psychically, socially, and emotionally-- for physical transformation. I reveal how Cistercian nuns and communities of laywomen were particularly adept at using such healing practices to provide for the daily health care needs of the sick and indigent in thirteenth-century Liège. At the same time, I offer reasons for their continued invisibility in our understood history of premodern healthcare as I explore the growing insistence, in medieval medical theory, on the material foundations of medicine. The research for this project, conducted in archives throughout Belgium and manuscript libraries across northern Europe, has been supported by a Huntington-British Academy Research Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and the Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America.
I currently serve as Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, where I teach courses on the history of Christianity, the history of medicine, gender relations in medieval Europe, historical research methods, and European historiography.
Medieval constructions of what we now call “nature” formed the subject of my first monograph, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell University Press, 2014). While scholars have long posited a sudden “discovery of nature” to explain the twelfth-century proliferation of herbal, floral, and arboreal iterations of labor, art, and prayer, my attention to distinctions between medieval, modern, and post-modern uses of the term “nature” showed that the historically shifting contents of this category had obscured our interpretation of medieval devotional practice and of the aims of religious communities. Instead of valuing the abstract concept of nature, the book demonstrates that a range of sources including theological treatises, agricultural projects, architectural plans, and manuscript illustrations reflect that later medieval Christians began to conceptualize the doctrine of the incarnation of their God as a fundamental transformation in the substance of the world’s material so that it might be inclusive of, susceptible to, divinity. A flurry of new devotional practices and forms of religious organization transpired as a result of this emerging doctrine of the world’s re-creation. Holy Matter provides an alternative narrative through which to interpret those new practices and communities; rather than seeing late medieval devotion as inspired by the suffering and passion of an incarnate God, the book demonstrates that we must consider religious change at this time in terms of a desire for presence, access, and divine abundance.
My current book project, entitled 'Salvation is Medicine': Gender and the Healing Communities of Late Medieval Europe, examines the place of the passions in medical, hagiographic, and theological discussions of the human body and its processes of healing. Affective healing remedies included prayers, charms, songs, and other narrations that worked to prepare the sick petitioner-- psychically, socially, and emotionally-- for physical transformation. I reveal how Cistercian nuns and communities of laywomen were particularly adept at using such healing practices to provide for the daily health care needs of the sick and indigent in thirteenth-century Liège. At the same time, I offer reasons for their continued invisibility in our understood history of premodern healthcare as I explore the growing insistence, in medieval medical theory, on the material foundations of medicine. The research for this project, conducted in archives throughout Belgium and manuscript libraries across northern Europe, has been supported by a Huntington-British Academy Research Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and the Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America.
I currently serve as Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, where I teach courses on the history of Christianity, the history of medicine, gender relations in medieval Europe, historical research methods, and European historiography.
