What can we know about women, food, and diet in the Middle Ages? Here, I cover a number of different interrelated topics having to do with medical dietary recommendations for women from the theoretical and practical medical traditions, the basis for those recommendations, and what we can learn about the folk traditions surrounding women, food and medicine. The book goes on to explore the themes of women and food more generally in the Middle Ages, with some parallels drawn with the Early Modern to contemporary issues involving diet, gendered roles in preparing and eating food, and medical views of women and food. Thus, this book is not exclusively about the medieval tradition of theoretical medicine and the role of food in medicine as it pertains to women. Instead, I seek to situate that tradition within the greater cultural context of women of all social classes, gendered expectations for women in gathering, preparing food, and feeding others, and the gaze on the female body and how it has been understood by the medical world as well as other quarters.

I write this book not as an historian, but rather as someone trained in both anthropology and folklore in the United States, with the particular views of culture as a whole and folk culture that that education entails. Having spent most of my research career on gender and foodways, my turn to these subjects in the Middle Ages was as a result of establishing a teaching career in a field somewhat outside of my training: for the last twenty years I have taught in a department of Humanities and Philosophy, where I bring perspectives on both Western and non-Western cultures to students.