Middle English Mouths - Late Medieval Medical, Religious and Literary Traditions

The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.

List of contents

1. Natural knowledge; 2. The reading lesson; 3. Tasting, eating and knowing; 4. The epistemology of kissing; 5. Surgical habits.

About the author

Katie L. Walter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at the University of Sussex. She is the editor of Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (2013), The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England (with Mary Flannery, 2013), and a special issue of Textual Practice on 'Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture' (with Chloe Porter and Margaret Healy, 2016). Dr Walter has published essays on the body, skin, flesh and the senses, as well as on medieval literary theories and reading practices.

Summary

Through new readings of canonical Middle English texts in relation to broader traditions and practices of the body and the senses, knowledge and ethics, this study offers an original contribution towards a history both of the human body and of medieval Christianity.

Product details

• Authors: Katie L. Walter, Katie L. (University of Sussex) Walter, Walter Katie L.
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2018
• EAN: 9781108426619
• ISBN: 978-1-108-42661-9
• No. of pages: 268
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature; Cambridge Studies in Medieval; Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama > Poetry; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Religion: general, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Poetry by individual poets, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Middle English