"This interdisciplinary study shows the ways in which literary texts intersected with social efforts to professionalize medicine and elevate the work of the male physician. It demonstrates how three fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary works - Jaume Roig's Spill o Llibre de les dones, Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, and Francisco Delicado's La Lozma andaluza - sought to discredit traditional women healers by transforming medieval textual models that had previously supported them.".

"Mediating Fictions examines the variety of strategies that these authors use to deprecate women healers, and in the process, to create early modern "others" to whom the ideal, male physician could be contrasted. Spill, La Celestina, and La Lozana andaluza all attempt to dissuade their readers from seeking the healing service of ordinary women."--BOOK JACKET.