Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry

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.

• AcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction The Making of a Medical DiscourseNarrative Medicine and Medical HumanitiesMicrocosmic BodiesChapter OverviewChapter 1 Honoring the Stories of Illness in Chaucer Physician, Heal ThyselfCharting “Pestilence”The Wounded ChildDiagnosing the Summoner and the FriarDiagnosing the Pardoner: “This” PestilenceWounded Knight / Wounded StorytellerMedicinal BarnyardMedicinal Gardens and the Hortus ConclususToward a Healing PhilosophyChapter 2 Therapeutic Dialogue and Intersubjective Medicine in Gower and Langland Pestilence and PenitenceConfession and the Seven Deadly SinsMedical Consciousness and the Psychophysiological BodyPractitioner and PriestReading the Cardiocentric Body: LanglandReading the Cardiocentric Body: GowerGower’s “Physique” and the “Parfit Practisour”Health in an Unhealthy World: LanglandHealth in an Unhealthy World: GowerDiagnosing the Storyteller’s IllnessChapter 3 Lydgate and Hoccleve: Dietetic Medicine and the Medicalization of Madness “A Doctrine and Diet for the Pestilence”“How the Plague was Ceased in Rome”“Fabula Duorum Mercatorum”Death and its DanceDeath and the Physician: A DialogueLydgate Meets Hoccleve VirtuallyKnock, Knock, Who’s There?Learning to DieFables from the Gesta RomanorumReading the Fables AllegoricallyGo Little Book, Go!Chapter 4Inscribing Medicine: Thornton Household Remedies John of Burgundy’s De Epidemia and Thornton’s “Medcynes for the Pestilence”From Pestilence to WoundsFrom the Literal to the Literary: WoundingReading for Dis-easeThe Healing Power of BloodFeverToothacheChildbirthNarrating Medicine in Thornton Household RecipesChapter 5 Women Healers, Life Writing, and Therapeutic Reading Women Healers and Communal MedicinePestilence and Household HealingChronicling the PestilencePassion to CompassionHeart and SoulTherapeutic Reading for WomenMedicine for Dis-easeTherapeutic Reading and the Vertu of Women’s HealingTwo Virtuous Women of RomanceBad Medicine: The Vilification of Women HealersNarrating Medicine for WomenChapter 6Afterword: A Prognosis Illness Narratives vs. Plague NarrativesLooking BackLooking AheadBibliography

Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry offers an intriguing reconsideration of late medieval literary writing and its contribution to contemporary medical knowledge and therapy in the age of plague.