Main description:

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.

Contents:

List of Abbreviationsix

Introduction

PART I. THINKING WITH Phisik

Chapter 1. Imagining Etiology

Chapter 2. Cause, Authority, Sign, and Book

PART II. PLAYING WITH Phisik

Chapter 3. Satire and Medical Materialism

Chapter 4. Embodying Causation in Exempla

PART III. EMPLOTTING Phisik

Chapter 5. The Metaphysics of Phisik in the "Knight's Tale"

Chapter 6. Desire and Defacement in the Testament of Cresseid

Part IV. PERSONALIZING Phisik

Chapter 7. Symptoms and the Signifying Condition in Hoccleve's Series

Chapter 8. From Noise to Narration in the Book of Margery Kempe

Coda

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments