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The Seat of the Soul: Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Literary Culture
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Star, Sarah |
| Copyright Year | 2016 |
| Abstract | My dissertation uncovers the ways that medieval literature both shares a physiological vocabulary with medieval English medicine and extends it. I argue that medieval romances, devotional prose tracts, and dramatic works all use a specifically physiological language to represent transformative miracles. At the same time that these texts use this vocabulary, however, they also do what medicine cannot: medieval literature, I argue, complicates and extends its physiological background in order to represent religious identities, mark religious difference, and explain the inextricability of physical and spiritual life. To establish an intellectual context for my analysis, I examine the earliest known academic medical treatise written in English: the Liber Uricrisiarum (c. 1379) by Dominican friar, Henry Daniel. Daniel’s treatise serves not as a singular source for the medical ideas discussed here but rather as a contemporary intertext that shares a physiological language with literature and that intersects with medieval literary culture in its distinctly vernacular style. The succeeding chapters focus on the role of blood in providing physical form and conferring religious identity in the anonymous King of Tars, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and the N-Town Nativity play. These works |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/92676/3/Star_Sarah_201611_PhD_thesis.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
