Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski (review)

Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects demonstrates that representations of physical bodies as "symptomatic"—that is, subject to both decay, death, and sickness and, also, to interpretation—were central to late medieval English imaginative writing. The book ranges with great energy over well-known works such as Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; marches through readings of less-familiar texts, including tales from the Gesta Romanorum, Hoccleve's Series, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; and runs through excerpts from medical works by Arnau of Vilanova, John Arderne, Guy de Chauliac, and Roger of Parma. The ambitious scope of the project—bodies, medicine, and causation—is somewhat overstated but exciting. Through her dynamic readings of texts that feature descriptions of bodily processes, Orlemanski shows that late medieval literary writers had come to see literary production as a space in which embodiment, textuality, and signification could be explored. Both bodies and written texts had become subject to interpretation and narration in late medieval England.

Orlemanski explains that her book "tells the story of how embodied subjectivity was narrated in its entangled relation to the world in the era of medicine's unprecedented textual vitality. In that, it offers one approach to the phenomenology of medieval selfhood, or, what it was like, within the era's mix of discourses, to reflect on both having and being a body" (2). The book traces patterns of causation and embodiment and draws a picture of late medieval textual etiology as a force that can be observed at work in literary writing. It defines etiology as concerned with "projects of explanatory invention" that explore causation in multiple ways. Like late medieval readers, whom the book's author describes as "bricoleurs of etiology" (3), Orlemanski herself gathers up literary writings representing physical ailments to create a collage of late medieval literature and its relation to medical/literary causality.

The etiology that Symptomatic Subjects finds most interesting is generic. Following two synthetic chapters that trace a broad history of medieval medicine, the book is composed of six chapters focused on literary works. These chapters develop a narrative about the representation of bodies and generic expression in the period. As this is the heart of the book, I first outline chapters 3 through 8.

The discussion of genre in these chapters is underwritten by recent scholarship on the link between narration and medicine. It is rooted, first, in the appearance in medical discourse of satire. Taking up a point from Douglas Gray's analysis of Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne" linking jargon and satire, Orlemanski produces readings of Henryson and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament that underscore the difficulty of reconciling the linguistic and the material. From satire she turns to exemplary stories, which she sees as functioning like medicine because both involve judgments concerning relationships between the general and the particular. Such adjudication, she observes, was subject to revision and, in some cases, incoherence. This, then, becomes the subject of a section about romance conventions in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Both texts focus on dying or diseased bodies and can be seen as doing so in relation to reflections on narrative closure. She turns then to the narration of self in Hoccleve's Series and Margery Kempe's Book. The Hoccleve chapter enacts Orlemanski's claims most effectively as it demonstrates that the Series can be seen to wrestle with "the self's inability to master its own materiality and the signifier's incapacity to guarantee its own meaning" (220). Her discussion of Kempe focuses on the Book's representation of involuntary crying, discussed in all its physicality, and movements between first- and third-person narration.

The outline above demonstrates the complexity of the book. Because this is the case, I describe two chapters in detail below to provide a sense [End Page...