Virginia Langum

Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400-1800

Do women have a history? Did women have a renaissance? These were provocative questions when they were raised in the heyday of womens studies in the 1970s. But how relevant does gender remain to p ...

Medicine, Sin, and Language

This chapter proposes three ways in which medieval texts medicalize the seven deadly sins: as metaphor, as metonym, and as material. As metaphors, medicine and the sins have an analogical relationship. As metonyms, medicine and the sins have a proximate relationship, specifically through the passions. In material terms, sins function as both the material causes and effects of bodily diseases. Finally, the chapter examines the use of confessional and penitential imagery—the language of sin—in medical contexts, in which medicine is not metaphor but rather metaphor is medicine.

Medicine and the seven deadly sins in late medieval literature and culture

This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can ...

Discerning Skin: Complexion, Surgery, and Language in Medieval Confession

According to Augustinian theology skin becomes darkened after the Fall. Man’s perception of himself, the world around him and others becomes limited, manifested by both his opaque body and his opaque language.1 The sign becomes removed from the signifier, opening the possibility for literary devices such as metaphor, while at the same time words become temporal and material. These physical and linguistic changes parallel each other. Just as the body darkens to enclose, separate, and cover the intentions of the heart, language also encloses, separates, and covers meaning. The influence of this Augustinian theology on medieval beliefs about language is particularly visible in pastoral discussions of confession; it is the role of the medieval confessor to interpret and to penetrate the opaque covering of the body—the skin—and its testimony. Thus, some medieval penitential texts urge confessors to read the surface of confessants’ material skin to determine their complexio and so, in turn, how likely they are to repeat certain sins.2 Complexio referred both generally to a person’s humoral balance, which revealed his or her temperament, and more specifically to the most immediate marker of this balance: his or her skin tone. Yet other texts advise confessors metaphorically to cut through the opaque covering of flesh and words to reach the naked interior.3

The Discourse of Hysteria: The Topoi of Humility, Physicality, and Authority in Women's Rhetoric

The Discourse of Hysteria : The Topoi of Humility, Physicality, and Authority in Womens Rhetoric