We are very pleased to announce that the 2026 Birgit Baldwin Fellowship has been awarded to Sheridan Kenzie Ward (Johns Hopkins Univ.) to support her dissertation project, “Houses of God: Devotion, Caregiving and Women s Work in Medieval France.” The Birgit Baldwin Fellowship in French Medieval History was established in 2004 by John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens in memory of their daughter Birgit. A summary of Ward’s project follows, in her words:
In thirteenth-century France, caring for the sick and needy was women’s work. Active caritas held special appeal for women as one of the few ways they could emulate Christ and the apostles. In the home and in religious institutions, thousands of medieval women cared for the sick, bodies and souls. But historians have struggled to document their actual practices. In my dissertation, Houses of God: Devotion, Caregiving and Women’s Work in Medieval France, I use the rich hospital archives of medieval Lille to analyze how hospital sisters cared for those in need. Hospital sisters decided how to apply the rules and guidelines of monastic life. Every day, they faced such questions as who should be admitted to the hospital, who should staff it, how to organize the day, what prayers should be said and when, who should administer treatments, what foods should be prepared, and more. These quotidian material practices suggest how hospital sisters provided for spiritual and bodily health.
In medieval France, hospital archives have been under-analyzed as key sources for healthcare and caregiving. Historians have documented the significance of women’s care to their communities. As Sharon Farmer has demonstrated, poor women relied on each other’s care to survive illness. In their analyses of medieval religious women, Anne Lester and Sara Ritchey have shown how religious women found meaning through acts of service to lepers and the sick. All too often, however, the details of women’s daily work remain invisible in the written record unless they were exceptional women venerated as saints. Hospital records, however, include remarkable detail to describe ordinary, everyday practice. Historians of medieval French hospitals like Adam Davis and Irène Dietrich-Strobbe have emphasized the role that hospitals played as charities and powerful institutions in their communities; however, I argue that they represent an important site for understanding healthcare. By centering hospital sisters as spiritual authorities and caregivers, my dissertation examines everyday care as a combination of religious devotion and healing work.
At first glance, a hospital’s administrative records appear dedicated to the financial affairs of the hospital. In my dissertation, I employ a material method to account books and inventories, which record the material imprints of caregiving practices when they list expenses for food, clothes, and linens bought for the hospital. Inventories and accounts list objects, which can be analyzed through “textual archaeology” as medieval historians like Daniel Lord Smail and Elizabeth Lambourn have put forward. By considering objects as evidence for practice, I will open a window into the hospital’s daily functioning and the rhythm of a religious life. These objects leave traces of practices like preparing healing foods, praying at the bedside, singing psalms, venerating relics, administering remedies, and laundering bedsheets. Reading this archive through the lens of materiality brings into focus the multiple layers of reinforcing meanings that these practices had for women who did not leave behind records written in their own hands.
The hospital archives of medieval Lille in the north of France provide the robust sources necessary for my material study of caregiving practices. Among the archives of medieval charitable foundations housed in the Archives départmentales du Nord in Lille, account books and inventories have survived in unusual abundance. This untapped resource will allow me to reconstruct women’s caregiving practices in detail, using a material method.
By treating account books and inventories as evidence of practices that kept the hospital functioning, I will argue that women performed healing care through devotional and bodily means. First, I analyze the process of writing account books and consider the significance of accounting to validate the hospital’s charitable function. The city government and the hospital’s patrons sought assurance that hospital sisters managed their resources and cared for the sick appropriately without excess. My second chapter maps these hospitals’ imprint on Lille’s urban landscape. Attending to hospitals’ spatial prominence in their communities sheds light on how people interacted with hospitals for care, for business, or for spiritual edification. The third chapter describes how sisters organized space within the hospital. Considering relics, beds, and linens allows us to glimpse logics of how hospitals used space to enable rest and recovery but also to worship and pray. My fourth chapter analyzes how hospital sisters nourished sick bodies, using evidence of the exchange of foodstuffs. My final chapter considers clothes, books, and the organization of time as healing practices that used devotional logics. Collectively, these chapters aim to highlight hospital sisters’ healing expertise and the significance of their daily work for their community’s wellbeing.
