Somiotics: Rhetoric, medicine and hermeneutics in John Donne

This study explores the interrelations of rhetoric, medicine and hermeneutics in the poetry and prose of John Donne. The opening chapter establishes medical thought as a key concept in Donne's hermeneutics by examining his interpretation of Scripture in the Essays in Divinity. I explore the role of Augustinian hermeneutics and the development of prudence and decorum as aspects of Donne's interpretatio scripti. I argue that medical thought provides Donne with a ground on which to build an understanding of textual interpretation.;Chapter two explores Donne's celebrated use of anatomical imagery in the Anniversaries. I argue that, for Donne, anatomy represents a static, normative conception of knowledge. In order to understand a living, afflicted body, Donne turns to somiotics, a term for a cluster of discursive practices that scrutinize the human body as an agglomeration of lisible signs. However, somiotics is fraught with presumption and conjecture; medicine itself is an uncertain art. Thus various interpretive tools were imported into medicine from other disciplines concerned with the judicious interpretation of probable signs. Chapter three establishes both early modern physicians' indebtedness to rhetoric and hermeneutics and early modern writers' indebtedness to medicine thought as a means to envision relationships between cause and effect.;In order to understand Donne's use of specialized medical terminology, chapter four explores the relationship between medicine, rhetoric and hermeneutics in antiquity. I examine the ways in which, from antiquity until the Renaissance, 'indications' function as arch-symptoms that afforded physicians access to the relationship between cause and effect in the living body. The testing ground for Donne's conception of indication is his own, afflicted body.;Chapter five brings together my argument in chapters one to four and explores the habits of thought and discursive and rhetorical techniques (exemplarity, 'indication' and the discourse of affliction) that underlie Donne's assertions about the relative effectiveness of sign-inference in relation to his own illness in 1623. In the Devotions, the concepts I have explored are woven together into an ethical fabric.;My epilogue argues that Donne used medicine, medical semiotics and medical history to argue about the problems and possibilities of human knowledge with a pleasing economy of scale. I conclude by identifying several forms of 'symptom history' both in the early modern period and in modern literary history.