...Marion Turner Medical language permeated all kinds of texts in premodern Europe, including legal, literary, devotional, political, autobiographical, and philosophical writings. The essays in this special issue are particularly interested in the functions of metaphor and of narrative. Many thinkers...

...Margaret Healy In the political turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England, both socio-political utopias and dystopias were repeatedly imagined through corporeal images and medical metaphors and narratives. The new iatrochemistry—Paracelsian and subsequently Helmontian medicine—featured especially...

... between judicial and penal procedures and the medicalized body. Across Caulier's successive interventions in the querelle , medical language at first complements then ultimately supplants juridical discourse. Unlike the “punitive” metaphors identified by Susan Sontag, medicalized language empowers...

... was marginalized by the church, metaphorical surgery was increasingly discussed.19 Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines, which uses a medical metaphor as its central organizing trope and engages in close detail with technical medical vocabulary, bears witness to the extent to which medical...

... available in physically and spiritually concrete ways to those who read or hear the text. © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 medieval spirituality and meditation medical language and metaphor physiology of the heart Henry Duke of Lancaster Livre de Seyntz Medicines...

... 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 suffering and of the limitations of metaphorical...

... writings; equally medical writings drew on a range of discursive practices, 454  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014 often employing ostentatiously literary narrative techniques. Many mod- ern thinkers, most famously Susan Sontag, have written about the effect of metaphors...

... 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...

... • “O Multiplied Misery The Disordered Medical Narrative of John Donne’s Devotions Jessica Tabak Brown University Providence, Rhode Island In what...

... upon a medical understanding of optics.55 Macrobius’s treatment of allegory in the Commentary also engages medical accounts of the male anatomy. In crafting his theory of allegory, Macrobius expands upon the work of those patristic writers who regularly use metaphors of uncircumcision...

... begins with Donne contemplat- ing what appeared to be his own imminent dissolution. He imagines his physicians, clustered around him, to be “Cosmographers” who study him as they would study a map. The metaphor of the prostrated poet “Flat on this bed” introduces the dominant conceit of the poem...

... by two types of alienating discourse: metaphoric and medical. The womb’s abil- ity to reproduce was famously metaphorized by Plato’s Theaetetus, which employs the extended metaphor of a Socratic midwife assisting the male mind in giving birth to ideas.13 By the sixteenth century, male poets, when...

... modern culture, the fluids were multiple and metaphoric, inviting a range of erotic wordplays and visual puns about urine, semen, water, and wine. The sexual economy was as much characterized by liquidity as it was obsessed with penile penetration. The somatics and semiotics of early modern masculinity...

... in the Works of Andreas Vesalius and Edmund Spenser Amanda Taylor University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota While the medical school and the English department are metaphorically a world...

... the pretence of playsters to salve us.” 2 The mountebank medicine-seller thus arrived in English print as a metaphor; early uses of the word made it both an adjective and a noun, a way of characterizing religious and political deceit in terms of medical fraud. 3 Many of these early texts, moreover...

...Susan Zimmerman The derogation of leprosy in medieval culture was disproportionate to its medical threat, presumably influenced by the spectacle of a disintegrative process akin to putrefaction. In the medieval imaginary, leprous blood was linked to menstrual blood, supposedly discharged by both...

... of trading manoeuvres, its transportation across huge global distances, its combination in a palette of flavourings or its use in medical prep- arations and other sorts of treatment. Part of the luxury status of spice . . . has nothing to do with the ways it is consumed...

... in 566 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 31.3 / 2001 search of metaphorical ingenuity could strut its stuff.16 About halfway through the poem, though, Donne finds himself guilty of precisely those procedures in which so much criticism of Donne is complicit—subordi- nating that body whose...

... Press 2018 Andreas Vesalius early modern anatomy human hand dissection medical education • • The Organ of Organs: Vesalius and the Wonders...

... to letters and news of others’ recoveries as cordials.73 A cordial was a common medical remedy and an apt metaphor for the joy and relief that accompanied written confirmation of a loved one’s recov- ery. Letters by both men and women describe just the receipt of a letter or the sight of a loved one’s...