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

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706321X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
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.

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

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706321X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe

Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Nancy S. Struever
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317063279
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection, for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays collectively explore the theories and practices, innovations and interventions, that underwrite the shared concerns of medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric: care and consolation, reading, policy, and rectitude, signinference, selfhood, and autonomy-all developed and refined at the intersection of areas of inquiry usually thought distinct. From Italy to England, from the sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth century, early modern moral philosophers and essayists, rhetoricians and physicians investigated the passions and persuasion, vulnerability and volubility, theoretical intervention and practical therapy in the dramas, narratives, and disciplines of public and private cure. The essays are relevant to a wide range of readers, including cultural, literary, and intellectual historians, historians of medicine and philosophy, and scholars of rhetoric.

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England PDF Author: John S. Garrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317548884
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.

Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World

Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World PDF Author: Christina Reimann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000173534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This volume explores the mutually transformative relations between migrants and port cities. Throughout the ages of sail and steam, port cities served as nodes of long-distance transmissions and exchanges. Commercial goods, people, animals, seeds, bacteria and viruses; technological and scientific knowledge and fashions all arrived in, and moved through, these microcosms of the global. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world in terms of the built environment, the particular sociocultural milieu, and contemporary representations of these spaces. Port cities, in turn, conditioned the lives of these mobile people, be they seafarers, traders, passers-through, or people in search of a new home. By focusing on migrants—their actions and how they were acted upon—the authors seek to capture the contradictions and complexities that characterized port cities: mobility and immobility, acceptance and rejection, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, diversity and homogeneity, segregation and interaction. The book offers a wide geographical perspective, covering port cities on three continents. Its chapters deal with agency in a widened sense, considering the activities of individuals and collectives as well as the decisive impact of sailing and steamboats, trains, the built environment, goods or microbes in shaping urban-maritime spaces.

Hybrid healing

Hybrid healing PDF Author: Lori Ann Garner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526158485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Through combinations of instructive prose and incantatory verse, liturgical rituals and herbal recipes, Latinate learning and oral tradition, the Old English remedies offer hope not only for bodily ailments but also for such dangers as solitary travel, swarming bees and stolen cattle. Hybrid healing works from the premise that the tremendous diversity of Old English medical texts requires an equally diverse range of interpretative methodologies. Through a case study approach, this exploration of early medicine offers a series of close readings tailored specifically to individual remedies, drawing from a range of fields including plant biology, classical rhetoric, archaeology, folkloristics and disability studies. Embracing the endless complexity of these Old English texts, Hybrid healing argues that the healing power of individual remedies ultimately derives from a dynamic and unpredictable process that is at once both deeply traditional and also ever-changing.

A Weaver-Poet and the Plague

A Weaver-Poet and the Plague PDF Author: Scott Oldenburg
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and mutual aid, as a gateway into a broader narrative about London’s “middling sort” during the plague of 1603. In debt, in prison, and at odds with his livery company, Muggins was forced to move his family from the central London neighborhood called the Poultry to the far poorer and more densely populated parish of St. Olave’s in Southwark. It was here, confined to his home as that parish was devastated by the plague, that Muggins wrote his minor epic, London’s Mourning Garment, in 1603. The poem laments the loss of life and the suffering brought on by the plague but also reflects on the social and economic woes of the city, from the pains of motherhood and childrearing to anxieties about poverty, insurmountable debt, and a system that had failed London’s most vulnerable. Part literary criticism, part microhistory, this book reconstructs Muggins’s household, his reading, his professional and social networks, and his proximity to a culture of radical religion in Southwark. Featuring an appendix with a complete version of London’s Mourning Garment, this volume presents a street-level view of seventeenth-century London that gives agency and voice to a class that is often portrayed as passive and voiceless.

Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser

Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser PDF Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.

Illness and Literature in the Low Countries

Illness and Literature in the Low Countries PDF Author: Jaap Grave
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847005200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
From as early as classical antiquity there has been an interplay between literature and medicine. The first book of Homer's Ilias recounts the plague that swept the camp of the Achaeans. While this instance concerns a full-length book, it is the aphorism that is of greater importance as a literary technique for the dissemination of medical knowledge, from the "Corpus Hippocraticum" of antiquity until the "Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis" (1715) by Herman Boerhaave. In addition, the subject of illness and its impact on mankind was explored by great numbers of poetic scholars and scholarly poets.This collection offers fourteen articles which all highlight the relation between disease and literature. It entails a first-ever overview of Dutch-language research in this field, whereby the literary and cultural functions of medical knowledge and the poetics of medical and literary writing are in the focus.

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature PDF Author: Megan G. Leitch
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152615109X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture PDF Author: Anderson Miranda Anderson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474438164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays bring recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition is seen as distributed across brain, body and world. The volume includes essays on law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine, covering topics such as the mind, life and soul; the body and environment; the emotions; language and linguistic theories; theory of mind and interaction theory; the self and subjectivity; social, material and conceptual environments; the memory arts, orality and literacy; and literature and the arts.