Overview

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.

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9781350249837

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A lively tour through late medieval English texts on medicine and embodiment, one that reminds us how inextricable healing and narration were and continue to be. * Social History of Medicine *

Author Information

Eve Salisbury is Professor of English, Emerita, at Western Michigan University, USA. She has edited four volumes for the Middle English Texts Series, authored numerous essays on medieval marriage and institutionally sanctioned violence and written a monograph on the representation of the child in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (Chaucer and the Child). She is the co-founder of The Gower Project, co-editor of Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, consulting editor of Comparative Drama, and member of Phi Beta Kappa.

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