Symptomatic Subjects. Julie Orlemanski
chapter, “Imagining Etiology,” serves as an introduction to the study as a whole. It describes the historical conditions of medicine’s textual efflorescence in England and maps out the crucial tensions defining phisik’s cultural role—tensions between theory and practice, science and art, generality and particularity, symptom and expression, and causation and agency. Chapter 2, “Cause, Authority, Sign, and Book,” explores phisik from four angles—how it grappled with causal understanding, how the authority to heal was negotiated, what the semiotics of the medical body looked like, and what bookish forms medicine assumed.
In Part II, “Playing with Phisik,” I turn to medicine’s implication in two literary modes. Chapter 3, “Satire and Medical Materialism,” shows how medicine’s jargon and its focus on the materiality of the body acted as the stimulus to satirical invective, particularly in Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Henryson’s “Sum Practysis of Medecyne,” and the East Anglican miracle play the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The fourth chapter, “Embodying Causation in Exempla,” argues that exemplary stories operated in ways that are parallel to medicine’s own modes of understanding: both sought to recognize a more general realm of governing principles in the fate of particular bodies. I trace the growing role of narrative in the medical writings of the later Middle Ages as well as the place of medicine and disease in homiletic literature, including the Gesta Romanorum and Piers Plowman.
Part III, “Emplotting Phisik,” tracks how medical terminology, the impingements of the material body, and etiological complexity come to be incorporated into the plots of two vernacular poems. “The Metaphysics of Phisik in the ‘Knight’s Tale’” focuses on the seemingly gratuitous medical language used to describe Arcite shortly before his death. I argue that Theseus’s final speech of consolation allows us to recognize phisik’s role in the tale’s imagination of alternatives to the monotheistic order of the Prime Mover. Chapter 6, “Desire and Defacement in the Testament of Cresseid,” shows how Henryson’s decision to strike Cresseid with leprosy effects a shift from the romance conventions of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to those of the exemplum. However, an incoherence in the exemplary plot creates uncertainty about what kind of justice is served. The would-be story of punitive disease is haunted by another tradition of leprosy’s medieval representation, that of affective devotion.
In the last part of Symptomatic Subjects, “Personalizing Phisik,” narrative voice, rather than plot, becomes the central object of literary analysis. The seventh chapter, “Symptoms and the Signifying Condition in Hoccleve’s Series,” explores the symptomatic self-loss that Hoccleve’s narratorial persona undergoes during his madness. I argue that Hoccleve knits together accounts of symptomatic and textual expression to offer a new embodiment of the signifying condition. Chapter 8, “From Noise to Narration in the Book of Margery Kempe,” reads Margery’s paramystical crying as a symptom. Her involuntary vocalizations, I argue, allow the Book to construct its own textual voice through iterative circuits of symptom and explanation, noise and narration. Finally, in the coda, I remark on Symptomatic Subjects in light of the scholarly subfield of the history of the body and issues of historical periodization.
PART I
Thinking with Phisik
Chapter 1
Imagining Etiology
On the final decorated folio of a fifteenth-century English medical manuscript, a figure gazes out. This is the Wound Man, a conventional surgical diagram that has been rendered here, in what is now London, Wellcome Library MS 290, with extraordinary delicacy (Figure 1).1 His well-proportioned body stands with a naturalistic grace, left leg slightly bent, even though the outline of his body is punctured with arrows, swords, clubs, and spears, and his skin gapes with open sores. He regards his viewers calmly from this unbearable embodiment, displaying his gashes and lesions. The picture is the last in a series of eight full-page medical illustrations in the manuscript, occupying their own quire after a pair of anatomical treatises in Middle English.2 The minute strokes of the artist’s shading evoke the heft of the Wound Man’s limbs and testify to a degree of mimetic craftsmanship in excess of the image’s technical purpose. Like the medical diagrams of the Disease Man, the Blood-Letting Man, and the Zodiac Man, the Wound Man is designed for heuristic reference, not verisimilar representation; he gives schematic and mnemonic shape to a long list of cutaneous conditions. But in this manuscript, unusually, the image has little connection to the accompanying medical texts, and the Latin labels that unfurl around him are not linked to further elaborations.3 He is unmoored from any straightforward purpose. The floating tools and weapons around him suggest the instruments of the arma Christi, the oft-depicted instruments of the Passion, and even more closely he echoes warnings against Sabbath breakers found in medieval English wall paintings, where images of the “Sunday Christ” show implements biting into Christ’s limbs just as they do into the Wound Man’s.4 Finely detailed features, his closed lips and heavy-lidded eyes, intimate a sense of lucid endurance and, together with this, the impression of inwardness, some self that is the locus of his undergoing. Whatever depths are hinted at, however, recede from the shallow openness of his chest cavity and the Wound Man’s bright, bared heart.
Figure 1. Wound Man. English, late fifteenth century, Wellcome Library MS 290, fol. 53v. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Untethered from texts describing treatment for his injuries, then, the Wellcome Wound Man is at least as much about the emotional and aesthetic pull of his injured figure as he is about surgical expertise.5 Like many of the corporealized figures discussed in the chapters to follow, he conjures a multitude of discourses and associations. The contents of the manuscript bespeak theoretical anatomy; his iconography’s origins are in surgical therapeutics; and the parallels with Christian devotional imagery are too obvious to be missed. But he also signifies in terms less bound by discursive context. Insofar as medicine addresses broadly shared conditions like pain, mortality, and physical flourishing, the line between technical expertise and palpable experience is never secure. The Wound Man, with his finely modeled limbs and face, exerts a mimetic and thus a recognitive claim. He is like us—and that intuition is perceptible in the minor discomfort of calling him an it. At the same time, this is unambiguously a diagram, a pigmented shape. Medical knowledge depends on the abstraction and inscription of corporeality, and the ontological gap between representation and flesh ongoingly qualifies interpretation. Between him and it, the Wound Man holds viewers’ gaze in the image’s crosscurrents.
Because the significance of the human body is never strictly scientific—because it attracts multiple schemes of regulation and recognition and calls up notions of experience, consciousness, and self—situations of medical explanation verge constantly into dramas of embodiment and expression, interpretation and feeling. This chapter and those that follow attend to such dramas as they unfolded in the era of medical writing’s popularization in England. Wellcome Library MS 290 is a small part of what was a sea change in how men and women in medieval England read and wrote about their bodies. During the later fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth, medical textuality flourished. English readers demanded and produced an enormous number of manuscripts addressing why bodies thrived and suffered and how