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  • Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England
  • Michelle Ann Smith
Vaught, Jennifer C., ed., Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2010; hardback; pp. 260; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9780754669487.

Beginning as an idea emerging out of a Special Session at Kalamazoo in 2008, the resulting collection of ten essays, brought together by Jennifer Vaught, is one that is broad in scope and thought provoking in its depth. Building on existing scholarship, the essays demonstrate how many forms of language are used to make sense of disease and health in relation to both the body and the cosmos. Part of the text’s originality can be found in its coverage of both disease and health from antiquity to the mid-eighteenth century, which allows for greater comparison and critical analysis between and within topics, and over time periods.

The essays draw primarily on the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, supplemented by the theories of the Church [End Page 239] Fathers, and using historical documents such as the plague bills of mortality, and medical guides. Covering a wide range of topics and genres within literature, medicine, religion, and science, the volume’s contributors explore rhetorical devices including pun, metaphor, allegory, and symbol to illustrate that speech had the ‘power to infect and heal but also to provide religious, moral, literary, and physiological rationales for the mysterious fragility of the human spirit, psyche, and body’ (p. 9). As each essay demonstrates, the body (and at times specific limbs, organs, or orifices and their relationship to language) becomes the site from which to draw those answers.

The first three essays explore theoretical ideas of the divinely perfect or disfigured body as a text. Lisi Oliver and Maria Mahoney examine works on physical anatomy by St Ambrose (Hexaemeron) and Hrabanus Maurus (De Universo Libri). They argue that Ambrose saw the body as a fortress, protecting the Christian soul against the assault of Satan and Paganism, while Hrabanus, writing much later, uses allegory and metaphor as his vehicle to further religious ideas at a time of religious upheaval. James C. Nohrnberg explores cantos XXIX–XXX of Dante’s Inferno to conclude that greed and frivolous consumption result in society’s physical, spiritual, and moral disfigurement as evidenced by leprosy, dropsy, and rabies. Fraudulence and its disfigurement also feature in Laila Abdalla’s essay on the ‘Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer’s Pardoner’. Here, the Pardoner’s body as text is an excellent example of how ‘corporeal incontinence’ serves to highlight the falseness of the Pardoner’s words and his lack of spiritual integrity (p. 84).

Delving into the ‘Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous’, the authors of the next two essays explore the sexualized rhetoric of Spenser and Shakespeare, demonstrating that healthy bodies can also be used didactically. William A. Oram’s analysis of Spenser’s Epithalamion highlights its stance that sex was good for the individual and therefore delightful, as long as it did not become debased and dangerous. Emma Lees takes an original, and gendered, approach in her discussion of the ‘Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear’. By refusing to agree with the play’s traditional link between female bodies and chaos, she instead argues that Shakespeare’s ‘metaphorical vaginas’ are a means to ‘resisting the silencing and sexual oppression of women’ (p. 14). Both essays in this section confirm that in the early modern period there was a tendency to ‘respond ambivalently to the sexualized dimensions of healthy bodies’ (p. 12).

Immersing the reader into the field of early modern science and statistics, Richelle Munkhoff uses the previously neglected London Bills of Mortality to demonstrate how new scientific methods of collecting data clashed with traditional methods of using woman searchers. She argues for more attention [End Page 240] to be given to these women who have been sidelined in favour of the apparent objectivity of scientific fact. Using early modern ideas of the cosmos and the humours, Rebecca Torato explores how the anger and cursing of Queen Margaret...

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