Claire Trenery positions this work as an answer to overly reductive dialogues about medieval madness. She is interested in 12th century miracle stories about individuals being cured of their madness, of which she focuses on the most physical, outwardly expressed versions (insania and amens). She explores how madness was diagnosed in the 12th century and… Continue reading Claire Trenery, Madness, Medicine and Miracle in 12th Century England
Tag: hollywood
Esther Cohen, Pain in Late Medieval Culture
Cohen argues that medieval pain is an individual phenomenon but also something that’s communal and shared. People either accepted pain as a holy experience, deliberately sought out pain, or ran from pain. Medical discourses, meanwhile, saw pain as an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of life. Although there were attempts at eradicating pain, generally it was… Continue reading Esther Cohen, Pain in Late Medieval Culture
Generations of Feeling, Barbara Rosenwein
In her book Generations of Feeling, Barbara Roswenwein is interested in providing a history of emotions that crosses the medieval/modern divide, giving us a genealogy of different ways of conceptualizing emotions. While she explicitly wants to follow this over the medieval/early modern divide, in order to show that concepts like rationality have a much longer… Continue reading Generations of Feeling, Barbara Rosenwein
Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”
This poem appears in a volume titled “The Minor Poems of John Lydgate”, and it is indeed minor (about 12 pages). I know next to nothing about Lydgate, but learned that he was a prodigious poet and friends with Chaucer’s son, Thomas. I’m reading Book of the Duchess in a few months and think I… Continue reading Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”
