Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (review)

Jennifer Vaught’s new collection, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, includes ten essays that engage with canonical and non-canonical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts in the context of their depictions of disease rhetoric. The authors of these essays are very prominent early modern literary critics and their essays demonstrate, firstly, their expertise with the texts they discuss, and secondly, very illuminating examinations of how these texts expose “rhetorics” of illness and disease. Moreover, these potentially arcane analyses of yet another literary trend lead to a much more important understanding of early modernity. As Vaught mentions in her introduction, “writers from antiquity to early modernity often created bodily metaphors, analogies, and allegories demonstrating links they perceived between the microcosm and macrocosm” (6). Indeed, the essays collected in this volume do a fine job illustrating how these literary devices reflected greater concerns beyond those of the literature and literary circles in early modern England. In light of the increasing interest in monstrosity and monstrous births in early modern literary studies, this volume is timely and a must-read for anyone working in these sub-fields as well as for anyone interested in new developments in scholarship on major literary texts.

Vaught has divided the ten essays in this collection into four parts, the first of which is entitled “Reading the Instructive Language of the Body in the Middle Ages.” In the first essay of this section, “Episcopal Antinomies of the Early Middle Ages,” Lisi Oliver and Maria Mahoney examine anatomy in the early medieval world through the writings of St. Ambrose and Hrabanus Maurus. Next to the ideas of these clerics, Oliver and Mahoney examine approaches to describing the body from physical and spiritual perspectives. As is the case with many of the essays in this collection, this article successfully negotiates the connection between inner worlds of subjectivity and their manifestations in outer appearance. In “‘This Disfigured People’: Representation of Sin as Pathological Bodily and Mental Affliction in Dante’s Inferno XXIX–XXX,” James Nohrnberg engages with the inner/outer motif in a brief section of Dante’s Inferno by arguing that “leprosy is a figure for all sin, and fever is a symptom of a host of potentially mortal diseases. Thus Dante’s comparison re-licenses a common enough medieval reading of physical ills as symptomatic or moral ones” (48). Nohrnberg shows great facility in close reading this very brief section of the Inferno, and the essay demonstrates greater significance than merely literary analysis in its discussion of moral theories contemporary to Dante. In “‘My body to warente ...’: Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Laila Abdalla argues that “Through the body and linguistic performance of the Pardoner, Chaucer debates whether a mal-intentioned but eloquent speaker may nevertheless be a vehicle for the numinous message” and analyzes this within the context of Augustinian hermeneutics of “language meaning and body” (65, 66). Together these three essays do a fine job introducing the reader to the legacy of “disease rhetoric” left before the early modern period began in England.

The essays in part 2, “Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous,” address the early modern reception of sexualized healthy bodies (12). In “Spenser’s Crowd of Cupids and the Language of Pleasure,” Spenserian William Oram argues that a specific stanza in Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion “is at once an attempt to valorize sexual pleasure, and to demonstrate how poetry concerned with sexual love can nonetheless remain chaste” (88). In “Cordelia’s Can’t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear,” feminist critic Emma L. Rees argues that in Lear, “Cordelia’s inability to speak in the face of her father’s direct entreaty is ... problematical [because] in the world of the play, soma, psyche, and language are imbricated in a taxingly provocative relationship such that (dis)ease in both microcosm and macrocosm is the only logical outcome of the tragedy” (105, Rees...