Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England

Jennifer C. Vaught is Jean-Jacques and Aurore Labbé Fournet / Board of Regents Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA.

• Introduction, Jennifer C.Vaught; part01 Reading the Instructive Language of the Body in the Middle Ages; Chapter 1 Episcopal Anatomies of the Early Middle Ages, Lisi Oliver, Maria Mahoney; Chapter 2 “This Disfigured People”: Representations of Sin as Pathological Bodily and Mental Affliction in Dante’s Inferno XXIX–XXX, James C. Nohrnberg; Chapter 3 “My body to warente…”: Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer’s Pardoner, Laila Abdalla; part02 Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous; Chapter 4, William A. Oram; Chapter 5 Cordelia’s Can’t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear, Emma L. E. Rees; part03 Bodily Metaphors of Disease and Science in Renaissance England; Chapter 6 Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London, Richelle Munkhoff; Chapter 7, Rebecca Totaro; part04 The Power of Linguistic Infection and Cure in Early Modern Literature and Medicine; Chapter 8 Shakespeare and the Irony of Early Modern Disease Metaphor and Metonymy, William Spates; Chapter 9 Body of Death: The Pauline Inheritance in Donne’s Sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s Sin and Death, Judith H. Anderson; Chapter 10 Subventing Disease: Anger, Passions, and the Non-Naturals, Stephen Pender;

'Bringing together scholars from an admirably wide range of disciplines, historical periods, and approaches, this collection repeatedly illuminates the ways that medieval and early modern writers translated bodily experiences into language. By focusing on the inter-related rhetorics of health and illness, the authors underscore how language is the necessary medium through which the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of the body are grudgingly revealed.' Michael Schoenfeldt, University of Michigan, USA 'Jennifer Vaught is to be congratulated on producing a fascinating, well-coordinated collection of essays by authors ranging from established experts to scholars embarking on promising careers. Her incisive introduction places the subsequent essays in relationship with the book’s overarching themes and each other, and begins with her own original contribution, supported by fascinating illustrations that deserve wider exposure... She also provides a substantial bibliography and index, features that will enhance the book’s value for readers from many disciplines, including social, political and medical history, classics, theology, and literature from the early middle ages to the eighteenth century. All the authors have produced ground-breaking work...' British Society for Literature and Science 'The quality and quantity of both explanatory notes and citations given by Munkhoff, Totaro, Anderson, and Pender are excellent and promise to be exceedingly helpful to those scholars who wish to pursue their ideas further... Vaught's text successfully achieves its goal of examining the variety and importance of rhetorics of disease and health in English literature and culture.' Early English Studies 'Part of the text's originality can be found in its coverage of both disease and health from antiquity to the mid-eighteenth century, which allows for greater comparison and critical analysis between and within topics, and over time periods... Completing this interesting collecti