Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor simile pun analogy symbol personification allegory oxymoron and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature religion science and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions these essays track the development of sustained nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health ” physical emotional and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives including the philosophy of language semiotics and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante Chaucer Spenser Shakespeare Donne and Milton among others; the genres of epic lyric satire drama and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality meteorology and medical guides for healthy regimens.