...Marion Turner Thinkers such as Elaine Scarry and Kathlyn Conway have written about the problems of master narratives of illness: pain can mark the limits of what narrative can do. This essay argues that late medieval writers not only had an understanding of the impulse to fit illness into narrative...

... this symptom arises from Donne's inability to order the events of his illness, he is able to recreate it within readers by likewise disordering the Devotions ' narrative. By sharing this contemplative “torment” with readers, the Devotions democratizes Donne's difficult path toward spiritual revelation...

... contemporary critics a new perspective on what it is to give a disease a meaning. © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 medieval Belle Dame sans Mercy debate illness narratives medical metaphor Achille Caulier Cruelle Femme en Amour and Hôpital d'Amour...

... that metaphor can be a strategy for organizing and patterning experience. Narrativizing illness similarly constructs patterns, imposing emplotment onto unruly bodies and minds. Marion Turner and Jessica Tabak both focus on narrative and draw on nar- rative theorists such as Paul Ricoeur, while also...

... Olivia Weisser University of Massachusetts Boston Boston, Massachusetts In her autobiographical narrative, Yorkshire gentlewoman Alice Thornton recounts the death of her sister, Catherine Danby, in 1645. Danby fell ill long before giving...

... Village (London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 56. 16 We should remember, however, that contemporaries did believe that witchcraft left a tangible trail of evidence, such as illness following a specific incident. See Sauter, Hexenprozess und Folter , 15–16. 17 Thanks to John Martin...

..., a fellow monk who had joined the Rood Klooster monastery near Brussels, in 1475, at the same time as Goes. This text recounts a journey to Cologne, when the painter “was seized by a strange illness of his mind; he uttered unceasing laments about being doomed and sentenced to eternal damnation. He even...

... are particu- larly interested in essays that can combine the archival recovery of previously neglected forms of textual production with a broader consideration of how this new material enables us to revise established narratives about the nature and uses of early modern books. Deadline...

... narrative techniques. Many mod- ern thinkers, most famously Susan Sontag, have written about the effect of metaphors in medical writings and about the practice of narrativizing illness. In premodern cultures, too, authors were profoundly aware of the problems inherent in trying to write about...

... by the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci illustrate this narrative silence with respect to nuns’ self-­ destruction. Landucci notes in his chronicle that on a wintry day in January 1514, a fifty-­year-­old man from the Martelli family, who was “seriously ill,” “threw himself into a well and was drowned...

... kinds of texts in premodern Europe, includ- ing legal, literary, devotional, political, autobiographical, and philosophical writings; equally medical writings drew on a range of discursive practices, often employing ostentatiously literary narrative techniques. Many mod- ern thinkers, most...

..., fictional and historical. As we disassemble these boundaries, we return in some ways to the textual approach of premodern and early modern readers. In sixteenth- century Europe, the categories of history and fiction were ill-defined, but became increasingly theorized. Attempts were made to police...

... in an authorial voice of the adjacent charge against Faithful in the narrative, of having bespattered gentry (92). But while Faithful and Christian, in their trial at Vanity Fair, are identified as enemies to, and disturbers of their Trade who had made Commotions and Divisions in the Town, and had won...

... / 37.3 / 2007 period illness of the Renaissance, embodied in its two great epochal icons: Dürer’s Melancholia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (It is for good reason that James Simpson begins his revisionist medieval history with the antiquary John Leland: alienated, torn, diachronically conscious...

..., for instance, and their diaries, and, above all, in their testimonies for and before courts — but all such stories, it is abundantly clear, are shaped by the strategies, situations, and expressive habits of the tellers, and by the narrative conventions of their world. Stories in or for a court...

... and transport people, goods, narratives, and images across the Atlantic was to feed the curiosity and wonder of read- ers in the Old World. In this essay I will trace different uses of images of New Spain in the books of three men who hoped to profit from Atlantic exploration: the Milanese traveler...

...Jaime Goodrich This essay considers how two Benedictine writers, Claude Estiennot (1639–1699) and Anne Neville (1605–1689), engaged with the generic conventions of historical writing, specifically the subgenre of monastic history. In an attempt to complicate critical narratives about early modern...

... of Christian belief. In this essay, I will argue that the leper, the female, and the Jew were connected in the medieval imaginary through problem- atic relationships of contaminated blood. Further, the narratives joining these groups were constructed, deliberately or inadvertently, as the neces- sary...

..., whose aggressive illnesses rob her of bodily control (4372). Even a reader unfamiliar with medieval Scots can glean the grotesque effects of her condi- tion from the onomatopoesis: Scho riftit [belched], routit [bellowed], and maid sic stends [convulsions], Scho yeild...

..., or at Corinth, where the same Commu- nion made some ill and others strong.31 In this story, the diverse effects are the problem, and suggest the thought that those in StAmé are not witnesses but fantasists. The further the narrative progresses, the less the real action 314  Journal of Medieval...