Sarah Mady

Research project

Milk Shrines: Ancient and Modern Healing in the Eastern Mediterranean

In small, unassuming spaces often left out of the historical record, women in ancient Lebanon built networks of healing shrines away from a male-dominated society.  In this sacred landscape women today continue to seek healing and an abundance of mother’s milk, and also use shrines as memorials to mothers and children who died prematurely.

Profile

Sarah Mady has taught several archaeology and anthropology courses on the intersection of women’s magic and religion. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with anthropological and archaeological methods to study the ways in which women have healed each other and their infants in the longue durée of the Eastern Mediterranean. By focusing on socially constructed spaces such as cave shrines, she traces back women’s presence in public spaces and studies their landscape of healing, grief, and memory.

Dr. Mady is currently editing a volume on the Archaeologies of Motherhood, where, alongside other scholars, she studies mothers as biological and social caretakers, from grandmothers to wet nurses. The book also emphasizes the importance of studying a “mother’s toolbox”, placing mothers as active agents and pragmatic individuals who have probably designed, but certainly used tools such as infant feeding bottles, magical amulets, and medicinal recipes to care for their young ones. 

Dr. Mady has presented her work in Lebanon, Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. She has published results of her archaeological fieldwork, notably the shrine of St Marina the Monk in North Lebanon. Her more recent work engages with women’s rituals practiced around pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. Dr. Mady is also interested in the intersection of colonialism, politics, archaeology, heritage, and museums.