Medical Analogy in Latin Satire provides an introduction to medical issues and images used in the tradition of Latin satire. The central concern of the book is what functions physical diseases and peculiarities had in early modern satires. It also explores how late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century poetics considered satire as a form of healing instruction and defined the satirist's duty to cure suffering and disturbed souls. The book offers fresh readings of numerous Neo-Latin texts, including praises of blindness, deafness, ugly faces and the itch, and it examines the moral and playfully philosophical significance of lethargy, fever, gout, extreme thinness and other diseases. The study invites us to rethink how generic conventions shaped the representations of disease, assessing the role of the satirist and the curative effects of satire on readers. By arguing that diseases improved individual morality, early modern satires opened up new, albeit playful, possibilities for approaching the good life.
'Medical Analogy in Latin Satire charts the long and varied history of the satiric commonplace that the pathology of moral and intellectual vice may be understood by the analogy of bodily disease, negotiating the maze of Humanist paradoxography and the Menippean world of mock encomia while unlocking the treasure house of various humanist anthologies, including Dornau's vast Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae (1619). No student of satire, verse or Menippean, classical or Renaissance, can afford to ignore or fail to be instructed by Kivistö's industry and insight.' - Joel C. Relihan, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, USA
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Medicine for the Sick Soul
Medical Meta-language: Renaissance Commentaries and Poetics on the Healing Nature of Satire
Painfully Happy: Satirical Disease Eulogies and the Good Life
Wonderfully Unaware: Sensory Disabilities, Contemplation and Consolation
Outlook and Virtue: Morally Symptomatic Physical Peculiarities
Satire as Therapy
Appendix: The Anthologies Used in This Study
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SARI KIVISTÖ works as a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her publications include three books on satire, ancient literature and culture, a dissertation on The Letters of Obscure Men, articles on classical traditions and history of rhetoric, and numerous translations from Latin into Finnish.
Description
Medical Analogy in Latin Satire provides an introduction to medical issues and images used in the tradition of Latin satire. The central concern of the book is what functions physical diseases and peculiarities had in early modern satires. It also explores how late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century poetics considered satire as a form of healing instruction and defined the satirist's duty to cure suffering and disturbed souls. The book offers fresh readings of numerous Neo-Latin texts, including praises of blindness, deafness, ugly faces and the itch, and it examines the moral and playfully philosophical significance of lethargy, fever, gout, extreme thinness and other diseases. The study invites us to rethink how generic conventions shaped the representations of disease, assessing the role of the satirist and the curative effects of satire on readers. By arguing that diseases improved individual morality, early modern satires opened up new, albeit playful, possibilities for approaching the good life.
Reviews
'Medical Analogy in Latin Satire charts the long and varied history of the satiric commonplace that the pathology of moral and intellectual vice may be understood by the analogy of bodily disease, negotiating the maze of Humanist paradoxography and the Menippean world of mock encomia while unlocking the treasure house of various humanist anthologies, including Dornau's vast Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae (1619). No student of satire, verse or Menippean, classical or Renaissance, can afford to ignore or fail to be instructed by Kivistö's industry and insight.' - Joel C. Relihan, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, USA
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Medicine for the Sick Soul
Medical Meta-language: Renaissance Commentaries and Poetics on the Healing Nature of Satire
Painfully Happy: Satirical Disease Eulogies and the Good Life
Wonderfully Unaware: Sensory Disabilities, Contemplation and Consolation
Outlook and Virtue: Morally Symptomatic Physical Peculiarities
Satire as Therapy
Appendix: The Anthologies Used in This Study
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Authors
SARI KIVISTÖ works as a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her publications include three books on satire, ancient literature and culture, a dissertation on The Letters of Obscure Men, articles on classical traditions and history of rhetoric, and numerous translations from Latin into Finnish.
|