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Body break-ups and poetic make-ups: medicine as metaphor in Soul and Body II and the metrical charms

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Abstract

The Anglo-Saxon Soul and Body II and metrical charms are seemingly related only inasmuch as they coexist as ‘minor’ works within the Old English corpus. If anything, they seem to exemplify opposition: Christian and pagan, death and life, harangue and incantation. This paper, however, will examine how both works ‘treat’ the body with words – a shared theme that is medicinal but also narrative-based, and as such is resonant with current initiatives in the medical humanities. I first demonstrate how Soul and Body II uses medical language to present the body’s surgical dismembering through words. I then show how the charms, in compelling contrast to Soul and Body II, present a process in which the body is healed through words. My conclusion reunites these seemingly opposed works by positing the restorative aspects of Soul and Body II, and by returning to the implications of these observations for modern medicine.

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Notes

  1. Specifically, 6 out of the 10 courses included in the analysis used some form of Margaret Edson’s play Wit, 5 out of 10 included Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, 4 out of 10 included William Carlos’ Williams’s The Doctor Stories, 3 of 10 included Albert Camus’s The Plague, and 3 out of 10 included Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (Walker, 2012).

  2. This is not to say that Anglo-Saxon medicine has not proven richly informative to modern medicine; more recently, a treatment for eye infections was found in Bald’s Leechbook (Rayner, 2015). My statement refers mainly to literary analysis that engages theoretically with the medical humanities.

  3. Wounds in the Middle Ages offers a multifaceted treatment of how wounds operated in the Middle Ages, both theoretically and experientially (Kirkham, Warr, and Cunningham, 2014). Regarding religious imagery in particular, see for example George Shuffleton’s introduction to his edition of Codex Ashmole 61 (2008).

  4. On encounters with the other, see Charon (2005, 2006). For a balanced discussion of what narrative medicine can offer scholars of literature, see Wooden (2011).

References

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Acknowledgements

An initial form of this paper was delivered as a conference paper for an ‘Old English’ panel at the Forty-Eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. I thank the participants and respondents for their work and feedback. My ideas were significantly shaped by an Old English seminar with Sarah Higley. Her suggestions, such as the very consideration of eschatology, substantially enhanced this paper; I thank her for her guidance as well as her example of creative, inspired, and richly informed scholarship.

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  1. Department of English, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Jenny Boyar

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Boyar, J. Body break-ups and poetic make-ups: medicine as metaphor in Soul and Body II and the metrical charms. Postmedieval 8, 147–161 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0042-6

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