The Textual Worlds of Henry Daniel

This article analyzes the overlapping textual worlds of fourteenth-century Dominican friar and medical writer Henry Daniel, and his literary contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer. Daniel understands medicine as a collaboration between learned and lay sources, a collaborative vision comparable to Chaucer's. But the two writers are also connected through their philological acumen, vernacular aesthetics, and technical innovation. Daniel belongs to a medical community, but his style and innovation demonstrate that he also shares a project of vernacularization with Chaucer.