Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England.
- Author / Editor
- Orlemanski, Julie.
Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England.
- Published
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
- Physical Description
- ix, 333 pp.
- Description
- Studies medical language and the "etiological imagination" of late medieval England, i.e., the "envisioning, arbitrating among, and emplotting [of] intricate causal chains" that seek to represent or explain the "frictional interface of causation and embodied agency." Treats depictions of medicine and causation in literary satires (including NPT), exempla, KnT, Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" (compared with TC), Hoccleve's "Series," and "The Book of Margery Kempe." Chapter 5, "The Metaphysics of "Phisik" in the 'Knight's Tale'," argues that the combination of "the seemingly gratuitous medical language used to describe Arcite shortly before his death" poses an alternative to the "monotheistic order of the prime Mover" in Theseus's final speech.
- Alternative Title
- The Metaphysics of Phisik in the Knight's Tale.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
Language and Word Studies
Knight and His Tale
Nun's Priest's and His Tale