Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture

Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture
Author: Virginia Langum
Publsiher: Springer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781137449900

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This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.

Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Author: Richard Newhauser,Richard G. Newhauser,Susan Janet Ridyard
Publsiher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781903153413

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A fresh consideration of the enduring tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, showing its continuing post-medieval influence.

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play 1375 1500

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play  1375 1500
Author: Hannah Bower
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2022-03-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780192666123

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.

Medieval and Early Modern Literature Science and Medicine

Medieval and Early Modern Literature  Science and Medicine
Author: Rachel Falconer Denis Renevey
Publsiher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2014-12-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783823368205

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This inter-disciplinary volume explores the poetics of medicine and science, and the scientific aspects of literary and devotional works in a wide-ranging selection of texts from the medieval and early modern periods. Areas of knowedge which we now regard as occupying separate and specialist spheres, were freely and fluidly hybridized in medieval and early modern times

Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry

Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry
Author: Eve Salisbury
Publsiher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781350249813

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Exploring medical writing in England in the 100+ years after the advent of the “Great Mortality”, this book examines the storytelling practices of poets, patients, and physicians in the midst of a medieval public health crisis and demonstrates how literary narratives enable us to see a kinship between poetry and the healing arts. Looking at how we can learn to diagnose a text as if we were diagnosing a body, Salisbury provides new insights into how we can recuperate the voices of those afflicted by illness in medieval texts when we have no direct testimony. She considers how we interpret stories told by patients in narratives mediated by others, ways that women factor into the shaping of a medical canon, how medical writing intersects with religious belief and memorial practices governed by the Church, and ways that regimens of health benefit a population in the throes of an epidemic.

Soul Health

Soul Health
Author: Daniel McCann
Publsiher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781786833327

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Soul-Health explores the connection between reading and healing. The act of reading engages deeply with our emotions and psychology, and this book broadens our understanding of that process by the surprising revelation that feeling bad has been understood as the best thing for mental and spiritual health. The mental and emotional impact of reading expanded in the Middle Ages into a therapeutic tool for improving the health of the soul – a state called salus animae – and focusing on later Medieval England, the present study explores a core set of religious texts that identify themselves as treatments for the soul. These same texts, however, evoke powerfully negative emotions. Soul-Health investigates each of these emotions, offering an analysis of how fear, penance, compassion and longing could work to promote the health of the soul, demonstrating how interest in mental and spiritual health far pre-dates the modern period, and is more complex and balanced than simply trying to achieve joy.

Middle English Mouths

Middle English Mouths
Author: Katie L. Walter
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781108426619

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First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

Symptomatic Subjects

Symptomatic Subjects
Author: Julie Orlemanski
Publsiher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780812296082

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In the period just prior to medicine's modernity—before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, the centralized regulation of medical practice, and the valorization of scientific empiricism—England was the scene of a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the emergence of printed English books a century and a quarter later, thousands of discrete medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. These widely varied texts shared a model of a universe crisscrossed with physical forces and a picture of the human body as a changeable, composite thing, tuned materially to the world's vicissitudes. According to Julie Orlemanski, when writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik—the language of humors and complexions, leprous pustules and love sickness, regimen and pharmacopeia—they did so to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. Orlemanski explores the texts of her vernacular writers to show how they deployed the rich terminology of embodiment and its ailments to portray symptomatic figures who struggled to control both their bodies and the interpretations that gave their bodies meaning. As medical paradigms mingled with penitential, miraculous, and socially symbolic systems, these texts demanded that a growing number of readers negotiate the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Examining both the medical writings of late medieval England and the narrative and poetic works that responded to them, Symptomatic Subjects illuminates the period's conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean.