Examining the body poetic: Representations of illness and healing in late medieval English literature

Like the anatomist dissecting the human body, the literary critic dissects the poetic body, examining its various facets in the hope of reconstructing a more perfect body of knowledge, a body greater than the mere sum of its parts. In this study, I examine the metaphorical implications of using images of illness and healing in literary discourse, specifically in fifteenth-century English literature. I argue that when late medieval authors incorporate contemporary medical principles into their discourse, they participate in a fundamental cultural attempt to give meaning to the experience of illness. In particular, this dissertation illustrates how authors exploit both the language of medieval medicine and the perception of an interconnected body and soul to offer the individual and society healing, edification, and transcendence. The first chapter discusses cultural conceptions of illness and healing and establishes a frame of reference for my analysis by comparing the holistic, inclusive approach of medieval medicine to the reductive, biomedical approach of modern western medicine. The next chapter focuses on the depiction of personal accountability for illness in Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Chapter Three addresses the resurrection of Lazarus in late medieval English drama with regard to the community's response to illness. In the last chapter, I concentrate on the image of the Virgin Mary as a healer of both body and soul in John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady. I selected these texts because each narrative employs images of illness and healing in thematically significant ways, addresses both individual and communal concerns, and emphasizes illness as a transitional state. These works also provide opportunities to discuss the function of metaphors of illness and healing in the popular medieval literary genres of secular poetry, religious poetry, and drama. I demonstrate how these metaphors can be at once literal and figurative, local and universal; how they enliven and enrich literary discourse; and how they offer insight into past and present cultural values and beliefs.