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

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health " physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.

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;