After witnessing the baptism of his son, in which the boy miraculously metamorphoses from a formless lump of flesh into a living child, the Sultan in the Middle English romance The King of Tars ...decides that his wife's Christian God is the true Father of all; spurred by this revelatory perception, the formerly Saracen Sultan is, in turn, baptized. Now that he is also a devout Christian, this Sultan, the ruler of Damascus, rushes to tell his father-in-law, the titular king, the entire case of his conversion. As the narrator reports, the Sultan plans to inform the king. In the narrator's account, Christianity, which sends "liif" to the Sultan's son, is a metamorphic force that plays a vital role in determining the categorization of the living and the dead. Like his son, the Sultan is equally given new life through Christian baptism, metamorphosing from "hepen" to Christian. With these dual (re)vitalizations, the narrator demonstrates a link between what one might call religious and biological categorization, which the poem identifies and develops through representations of transformative miracles. Here, Star elucidates the implications of the link and the transformations in relation to medical discourse and the question of individual identity.
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Henry Daniel, fourteenth-century medical writer, Dominican friar, and contemporary of Chaucer, is one of the most neglected figures to whom we can attribute a substantial body of extant works in ...Middle English. His Liber Uricrisiarum , the earliest known medical text in Middle English, synthesizes authoritative traditions into a new diagnostic encyclopedia characterized by its stylistic verve and intellectual scope.
Drawing on expertise from a range of scholars, this volume examines Daniel’s capacious works and demonstrates their significance to many scholarly conversations, including the history of late medieval medicine. It explains the background for Daniel’s uroscopic and herbal work, describes all known versions of the Liber Uricrisiarum and traces revisions over time, analyses Daniel’s representations of his own medical practice, and demonstrates his influence on later medical and literary writers.
Both a companion to the recently published reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum and a work of original scholarship in its own right, this collection promotes a wider understanding of Daniel’s texts and prompts new discoveries about their importance.
Julian’s detailed descriptions of Christ’s bleeding body, this article demonstrates, relies on physiological language that she shares with medical discourse. Reading A Revelation of Love alongside ...medieval medical treatises, such as Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum or Henry Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum, can help us better understand Julian’s theology. She combines theology and medicine to construct a unique picture of a Jesus who, as a man, shares a physiological makeup with all humans and who, as a Savior, connects humans to the divine.
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4.
Liber Uricrisiarum Daniel, Henry; Harvey, E.Ruth; Tavormina, M. Teresa ...
2020
eBook
Open access
Henry Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum is the earliest known work of academic medicine written in Middle English, presented here for the first time in a complete edition. Working in the late 1370s, Daniel ...combined authoritative medicine from written sources with his own personal experience, creating a text that stands out for its linguistic originality, intellectual scope, and wide circulation. Extant in over three dozen manuscript witnesses and two early modern print copies, Liber Uricrisiarum describes medieval humoral theory, anatomy, physiology, disease, medical astronomy, reproductive processes, and more, all within the broader context of uroscopic diagnosis. The introduction situates the text and its author in their medical, intellectual, linguistic, and bibliographic contexts, outlining the uroscopic tradition to which Daniel contributes, and describing the relationships among the many manuscripts containing the Liber Uricrisiarum. This edition presents the Middle English text, with a general glossary, glossary of proper names, and explanatory notes that explain obscure words and phrases and identify Daniel's sources. It also includes the complete set of diagrams contained in the Royal manuscript; appendices providing the Latin and English versions of the prologue and epilogue; an extensive translation from one of Daniel's important sources, Isaac Israeli's De urinis; tables relevant to Daniel's astronomical measurements; and an analysis of the Royal manuscript's dialect. Cumulatively, the edition and apparatus introduce readers to an important yet understudied text, the details of which will have significant impact on studies of medieval medicine and science, intellectual history, and Middle English language and literature.
MS HM 505 in the Huntington Library contains the first known academic medical treatise in Middle English, Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum. The manuscript includes more than a thousand English words ...that either predate, or are contemporary with, their earliest recorded occurrence according to the OED and MED. In this lexicographic study, Sarah Star lists the terms and argues that Henry Daniel occupies a crucial, but hitherto overlooked, place in the history of English medicine and the history of the English language.
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This article examines the role of calkas in troilus and criseyde, paying particular attention to his influence on the exchange in book iv and his importance for diomede in book v. by comparing ...troilus with its vernacular and latin precedents, we show that chaucer makes calkas both the voice of historical determinism and a locus of individual agency, both a knowing authority and an untrustworthy schemer. chaucer's troilus questions the certainty and inevitability of calkas' prophecy, a skepticism that also affects the narrator's posture of self-representation, diomede's appropriation of the past, and the poem's conception of “gret auctorite.”
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My dissertation uncovers the ways that medieval literature both shares a physiological vocabulary with medieval English medicine and extends it. I argue that medieval romances, devotional prose ...tracts, and dramatic works all use a specifically physiological language to represent transformative miracles. At the same time that these texts use this vocabulary, however, they also do what medicine cannot: medieval literature, I argue, complicates and extends its physiological background in order to represent religious identities, mark religious difference, and explain the inextricability of physical and spiritual life. To establish an intellectual context for my analysis, I examine the earliest known academic medical treatise written in English: the Liber Uricrisiarum (c. 1379) by Dominican friar, Henry Daniel. Daniel’s treatise serves not as a singular source for the medical ideas discussed here but rather as a contemporary intertext that shares a physiological language with literature and that intersects with medieval literary culture in its distinctly vernacular style. The succeeding chapters focus on the role of blood in providing physical form and conferring religious identity in the anonymous King of Tars, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and the N-Town Nativity play. These works collectively demonstrate a desire on the part of late medieval writers to negotiate the shifting relationship between the body, religion, and the English language. Ultimately, I reconceptualize our understanding of late medieval intellectual culture, showing that medical works have relevance beyond a strictly professional or curative context and that literary works, in their physiological and symbolic representations of blood, combine medical and theological discourses in greater detail than scholarship has acknowledged previously.
Introduction SARAH STAR
Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing,
01/2022
Book Chapter
Henry Daniel, a fourteenth-century Dominican friar, wrote two impressive academic medical treatises in Middle English, the significance of which modern scholarship has only barely begun to grasp: ...first, the Liber Uricrisiarum (ca. 1375–82), a diagnostic text on uroscopy, and then, shortly after, an herbal manual.¹ Composing medical texts in English during the last quarter of the fourteenth century was rare, and doing so places Daniel on the cusp of what would become a burgeoning vernacular movement. He tells “Walter Turnour of Ketoun” (Pro.5),² his colleague and commissioner of the Liber Uricrisiarum, about the text’s originality. Daniel asserts himself as
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