Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague.
- Author/Editor
- Salisbury, Eve.
- Title
- Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague.
- Published
- Salisbury, Eve. Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
- Review
- Salisbury explores "a kinship between the art of writing and the art of healing" (1), crediting as her model Rita Charon's theory of "narrative medicine, which teaches how to engage a text both by observing its representation of physical symptoms and by listening closely to the stories told by patients in practice, and, in this case, by some of the most innovative and perceptive English poets and prose writers of the late Middle Ages" (2). The book addresses Chaucer (chapter 1), Gower and Langland (chapter 2), Lydgate and Hoccleve (chapter 3), the Thornton manuscript (chapter 4), and "Women Healers" (chapter 5). Salisbury terms Gower and Langland "therapeutic writers," composing the "Confessio Amantis" and "Piers Plowman" "at a pivotal historical moment beset by recurrent outbreaks of the plague" (49). Gower, she argues, understood the plague "as a marker of the species of social disruption (or dis-ease) that affects the equanimity of the body politic as well as the humoral balance of the body human" (50)--entities which Salisbury sees as integrally connected no less than the body is connected to the soul (56-61). Somewhat surprisingly, she reads Amans as a "young man" in need of (less surprisingly) "healing," whose cure is "storytelling and dialogue" (51). The organization of the CA around the seven sins constitutes a "moralization of medicine" that, by prompting self-reflection and reform, leads to better health for the individual and society both (esp. 76-78). In this sense, Genius, as a priest, is also recognizable as a physician (61-63). The effect is carried forward by medically specialized terminology and references throughout, i.e., to "physicians and surgeons, or empirics, to medicine and medical practice, maladies of the psychophysiological body, as well as a variety of medicaments--gemstones, plants, and organic substances--used as remedies" (53). Noting that, following Aristotle, most fourteenth-century thinkers (Gower included) located the soul in the heart, Salisbury finds the "Tale of Constantine and Sylvester" (CA II. 3187-3496) representative of how narrative medicine (along with a little "holy medicine"--full body immersion baptism) can cure a disease (leprosy) with both physical and moral dimensions (67-72); later in CA Book VIII. 1151-1271), in the recovery of Apollonius' wife from apparent death by the physician Cerymon, she finds another--perhaps clearer--presentation of Gower's close attention to medical issues (72-74). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Backgroud and General Criticism