Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England -- Part 1 Reading the Instructive Language of the Body in the Middle Ages -- 1 Episcopal Anatomies of the Early Middle Ages -- 2 8220;This Disfigured People8221;: Representations of Sin as Pathological Bodily and Mental Affliction in Dante8217;s Inferno XXIX8211;XXX -- 3 8220;My body to warente8230;8221;: Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer8217;s Pardoner -- Part 2 Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous -- 4 Spenser8217;s Crowd of Cupids and the Language of Pleasure -- 5 Cordelia8217;s Can8217;t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear -- Part 3 Bodily Metaphors of Disease and Science in Renaissance England -- 6 Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London -- Part 4 The Power of Linguistic Infection and Cure in Early Modern Literature and Medicine -- 7 8220;Revolving this will teach thee how to curse8221;: A Lesson in Sublunary Exhalation -- 8 Shakespeare and the Irony of Early Modern Disease Metaphor and Metonymy -- 9 Body of Death: The Pauline Inheritance in Donne8217;s Sermons, Spenser8217;s Maleger, and Milton8217;s Sin and Death -- 10 Subventing Disease: Anger, Passions, and the Non-Naturals -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
Contributors analyze works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others to track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health-physical, emotional, and spiritual. Focusing on literary genres (epic, lyric, satire, drama, sermon) and cultural history artifacts, the volume examines the extent to which rhetorical figures of sickness and health inform literature, religion, science, and medicine in medieval and early modern England and Europe
