Singer, Julie (Author)
In the later Middle Ages, poets and medical writers often treated shared subject matter, as both sought to describe the human body and its relationships with the outside world. Conventional wisdom holds that medical writings of the period are possessed of a sort of absolute cultural authority, while poetic texts that engage with concepts typically claimed by the scientific domains are ciphers to be "decoded" through the lens of these scientific treatises. However, a closer look at the interplay between specific poetic texts and the medical texts with which they share their language and their ideas reveals a far more dialogic system of references and debates. Lines of Sight focuses specifically on the image of the eye in the French and Italian textual tradition in order to problematize the accepted model of scientific authority. The eyes--and the ambiguous space between not seeing, seeing, and even seeing too much --provide a laboratory in which to test poetic writers' acceptance of medical models of "wholeness" and "remedy." Seeing is crucial to knowledge and to the model of love, prevalent in medical, poetic, and philosophical texts, that I have termed the love-imprint. According to this model love was held to be a physiologically-based phenomenon arising from the contemplation of the beloved, whose image passes through the eyes and brain before becoming imprinted in the lover's heart. But if love is a bodily process that begins in the eyes, then how does blindness affect the form and content of love poetry? Through close readings of literary and medical texts, I argue that late medieval and early modern authors complicate a unidirectional model of authority by constructing alternate literary remedies to blindness. Guido Cavalcanti's appropriation of "scientific" language in Donna me prega, Petrarch's attacks on physicians in the Invective and the rhetorical remedies he proposes in De remediis utriusque fortunae, and Guillaume de Machaut's poetic prosthesis in the Livre du Voir Dit may all be construed as proposing thematic and formal remedies designed to rival or replace the dominant medical understanding of the eye and its (dys)functions.
...MoreDescription A study of poetics and science through a focus on the image of the eye and its physiological relationship to love. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/06 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3267931.
Thesis
Silverman, William John, Jr.;
(2011)
Seeing While Blind: Disability, Theories of Vision, and Milton's Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB001567262/)
Book
Clark, Stuart;
(2007)
Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB000952788/)
Book
Gentile da Foligno (pseudo);
Girolamo di Viterbo;
Evangelista Bartoli;
Edoardo D'Angelo;
(2019)
Le terme di Viterbo tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. La trattatistica in latino: pseudo Gentile da Foligno, Girolamo di Viterbo, Evangelista Bartoli
(/isis/citation/CBB832944506/)
Thesis
Hall, Crystal;
(2008)
Paladin Philosophy: Epic Voices in Galileo's Library
(/isis/citation/CBB001560543/)
Chapter
Raman, Shankar;
(2012)
Constructing Selves, Making Publics: Geometry and Poetry in Descartes and Sidney
(/isis/citation/CBB001201597/)
Chapter
Carlo Gelmetti;
(2015)
La dermatologia e la venereologia dal Rinascimento al XVIII secolo
(/isis/citation/CBB383272190/)
Book
Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini;
(1993)
Dalla scienza medica alla pratica dei corpi: Fonti e manoscritti marciani per la storia della sanita
(/isis/citation/CBB987889704/)
Book
Chiara Beatrice Vicentini;
Donatella Mares;
(2018)
Il Tesoro della sanità
(/isis/citation/CBB227799761/)
Thesis
Mellyn, Elizabeth Walker;
(2007)
A History of Madness, Medicine, and the Law in Italy, 1350--1650
(/isis/citation/CBB001561309/)
Chapter
Carlo Gelmetti;
(2015)
La sifilide: una storia intrigante
(/isis/citation/CBB036079552/)
Thesis
Passannante, Gerard Paul;
(2007)
The Lucretian Renaissance: Ancient Poetry and Humanism in an Age of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001560763/)
Chapter
Heilen, Stephan;
(2011)
Lorenzo Bonincontri's Reception of Manilius' Chapter on Comets (Astr. 1.809--926)
(/isis/citation/CBB001201037/)
Thesis
Cordell, Jeffrey Ernst;
(2008)
Error's License: Defending Poetry and Science in Renaissance England
(/isis/citation/CBB001561377/)
Chapter
Takami Matsuda;
(2015)
Purgatory and Spiritual Healing in John Audelay's Poems
(/isis/citation/CBB458324469/)
Article
Hilloowala, Rumy;
(2004)
Leonardo da Vinci, Visual Perspective and the Crystalline Sphere (Lens): If Only Leonardo Had Had a Freezer
(/isis/citation/CBB000932433/)
Book
Dominique Raynaud;
(2018)
Studies on Binocular Vision: Optics, Vision and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB425442727/)
Book
Carlino, Andrea;
Jeanneret, Michel;
(2009)
Vulgariser la médecine: du style médical en France et en Italie, XVIe et XVIIe siècles
(/isis/citation/CBB001024935/)
Chapter
Cohen-Hanegbi, Na'ama;
(2012)
Pain as Emotion: The Role of Emotional Pain in Fifteenth-Century Italian Medicine and Confession
(/isis/citation/CBB001214269/)
Article
Clark-Evans, Christine;
(2003)
The Poetic Brain: Neuroscience and Myth in the Poetry of Louise Labé and Pierre de Ronsard
(/isis/citation/CBB000430319/)
Article
Wintroub, Michael;
(2009)
The Heavens Inscribed: The Instrumental Poetry of the Virgin in Early Modern France
(/isis/citation/CBB000932108/)
Be the first to comment!