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  • Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England ed. by Jennifer C. Vaught
  • Louise Bishop
Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England. Edited by Jennifer C. Vaught. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. xiii + 243; 11 illustrations. $104.95.

This collection of ten essays plus the editor’s Introduction exemplifies the vigor of historical and literary research into premodern and early modern healing, literary art, and society. The book joins other 2010 imprints including two that treat, on the one hand, Europe generally—Body, Disease and Treatment in a Changing World, a collection of essays published by the University of Lausanne—and, on the other, a single-author area study: Michael Solomon’s Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Notre Dame). Vaught’s collection focuses on Britain, but the reach of the essays extends across eras as well as languages: Latin, vernacular English, and, in one case, Dante’s Italian.

Vaught’s Introduction lets us know that essays will touch upon topics both broad (e.g., objectivity) and minute (e.g., farts), with attention to readers’ experiences and with theoretical sophistication. The excellent opening essay by Lisi Oliver and Maria Mahoney treats what they call the “episcopal anatomies” of St. Ambrose, Isidore of Seville, and Hrabanus Maurus. The essay focuses on changes in anatomical interpretation—the relationship between the material and spiritual—from the late fourth century CE to the late ninth century CE. Architectural and spatial metaphors may articulate the body’s spiritual meanings throughout these centuries, but, as Oliver and Mahoney cunningly write, Ambrose is “content to peer down from the deck rather than descend into the bilge” (p. 28). Leave it to Hrabanus, five centuries later, to get his hands dirty while combatting the iconoclasm controversy. Isidore’s seventh-century CE Etymologies bridges Ambrose and Hrabanus, and Hrabanus amplifies what he has found in Ambrose and Isidore. For instance, Hrabanus takes an anatomical tidbit from Isidore—eyesockets form in the womb through pressure from the knees—to explain why “people are immediately moved to tears when they fall on their knees” (p. 32). This is Hrabanus [End Page 246] to a T: extending what he gets from both Ambrose and Isidore not only to meet the challenges of iconoclasm but also to expand links between physical matter and spiritual meaning. Analysis of such links’ complicated rhetoric is a thread holding the entire collection of essays together.

Opening the book with a treatment of “episcopal anatomies” in a section entitled “Reading the Instructive Language of the Body in the Middle Ages” sets the stage for connecting and distinguishing the medieval and the early modern, as well as acknowledging a theological substrate that affects the rhetoric of healing throughout both periods. The following two essays explicitly concern literature of the Middle Ages: James C. Nohrnberg’s “‘This Disfigured People’: Representation of Sin as Pathological Bodily and Mental Affliction in Dante’s Inferno XXIX–XXX,” and Laila Abdalla’s “‘My body to warente . . .’: Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer’s Pardoner,” on the spiritual and bodily rhetoric of that ambiguous figure. Part 2, “Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous,” moves to the early modern period and continues a literary direction. William Oram’s essay, “Spenser’s Crowd of Cupids and the Language of Pleasure,” explores, in the Epithalamion, Spenser’s typically Spenserian defense—typical because it is simultaneously recondite and startlingly concrete—of connubial bliss. The second essay, “Cordelia’s Can’t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear,” by Emma Rees, focuses on Cordelia’s negative space, which Rees reads as a vagina. In light of sociocultural analyses of sex and the language they use, that reference is not as wacky as it might at first seem. Rees unpacks the “nothing” of the play’s lexicon with some originality.

Part 3 is titled “Bodily Metaphors of Disease and Science in Renaissance England.” Feminist scholars will appreciate Richelle Munkhoff’s “Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London,” the first of Part 3’s two essays...

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