Symptomatic subjects : bodies, medicine, and causation in the literature of late medieval England

Title
  1. Symptomatic subjects : bodies, medicine, and causation in the literature of late medieval England / Julie Orlemanski.
Published by
  1. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]
Author
  1. Orlemanski, Julie

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Details

Description
  1. viii, 333 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.
Summary
  1. "In the period just prior to medicine's modernity--before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, the centralized regulation of medical practice, and the valorization of scientific empiricism--England was the scene of a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the emergence of printed English books a century and a quarter later, thousands of discrete medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. These widely varied texts shared a model of a universe crisscrossed with physical forces and a picture of the human body as a changeable, composite thing, tuned materially to the world's vicissitudes. According to Julie Orlemanski, when writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik--the language of humors and complexions, leprous pustules and love sickness, regimen and pharmacopeia--they did so to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. Orlemanski explores the texts of her vernacular writers to show how they deployed the rich terminology of embodiment and its ailments to portray symptomatic figures who struggled to control both their bodies and the interpretations that gave their bodies meaning. As medical paradigms mingled with penitential, miraculous, and socially symbolic systems, these texts demanded that a growing number of readers negotiate the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Examining both the medical writings of late medieval England and the narrative and poetic works that responded to them, Symptomatic Subjects illuminates the period's conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean"--from the jacket.
Series statement
  1. Alembics : Penn studies in literature and science
Uniform title
  1. Alembics
Subject
  1. To 1500
  2. Literature and medicine > England > History > To 1500
  3. Diseases > England > Causes and theories of causation > History > To 1500
  4. English literature > Middle English, 1100-1500 > History and criticism
  5. Human body in literature
  6. Causation in literature
  7. Medicine, Medieval
  8. Literature, Medieval
  9. Causation
  10. History, Medieval
  11. Literature, Medieval
  12. Causality
  13. Medicine, Medieval
  14. Causation
  15. Causation in literature
  16. Diseases > Causes and theories of causation
  17. English literature > Middle English
  18. Human body in literature
  19. Literature and medicine
  20. Mittelenglisch
  21. Literatur
  22. Medizin Motiv
  23. Körper Motiv
  24. United Kingdom
  25. England
Genre/Form
  1. Criticism, interpretation, etc.
  2. History
Contents
  1. Part 1. Thinking with phisik -- Imagining etiology -- Cause, authority, sign, and book -- Part II. Playing with phisik -- Satire and medical materialism -- Embodying causation in exempla -- Part III. Emplotting phisik -- The metaphysics of phisik in the "Knight's Tale" -- Desire and defacement in the Testament of Cresseid -- Part IV. Personalizing phisik -- Symptoms and the signifying condition in Hoccleve's Series -- From noise to narration in the Book of Margery Kempe.
Owning institution
  1. Princeton University Library
Bibliography (note)
  1. Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-324) and index.