Abstract
This chapter argues that writers of late-medieval English vernacular literature—medical, scientific, theological, homiletic, dramatic, devotional and didactic—maintained and developed a subtle and complex understanding of the body and the soul as essentially and radically unlike in characteristics and nature, yet simultaneously bound together in indissoluble relationship to create individual human identities. Yet this relationship itself was not seen as unchanging; writers introduced intriguing inversions and anomalies into their accounts of soul-body identities and relationships by posing them in the context of the long and changing histories of individual and human-wide salvation or damnation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See, e.g., Langland, (1995), vol. 1, p. 568; B text, Passus XV l. 11: the dreamer is instructed by ‘a sotil thyng withalle–Oon withouten tonge and teeth’, which proves to be the soul.
- 3.
The author claims to be quoting John Damascene.
- 4.
See Books 4–6 for the author’s contrasting treatment of the different parts of the body and their development over the life-cycle.
- 5.
Again allegedly quoting John Damascene.
- 6.
Bynum (1991b p. 151). But note the brilliant succeeding argument on how the feminine might be revalued through association with the incarnate bodily form of Christ.
- 7.
Cf. also Fisher (1876, p. 300).
- 8.
- 9.
Raskolnikov (2009 pp. 24, 109–110, 117–118, 128).
- 10.
See, e.g., Small (1862, p. 122): ‘A human soul is Christ’s spouse’ [‘mannes sawel ess Cristes spouse’].
- 11.
Seymour (1975, pp. 95, 90); emphasis mine.
- 12.
Seymour (1975)The sailor/ship analogy derives ultimately from Aristotle’s De Anima. For the rider/steed metaphor, see the Middle English Body and Soul debate ‘Als I lay in a winteris nyt’, in Conlee, (1991, pp. 18–39), where Body describes how he ‘bore thee [Soul] on my back’ everywhere (p. 33, l. 266), while Soul alleges that ‘With your teeth you took the bridle’, and ‘ran about and brayed madly’. (p. 31, ll. 219 and 228: ‘Wedir I yede vp or doun,/That I ne bar the on my bac’; ‘With thi teth the bridel thouz lauzt’; ‘renne aboute and breyd wod’). See also the examination of this steed and rider metaphor in Vogel (1948). For an adult/child metaphor, see Halliwell (1855, p. 28), where Body complains that God gave Soul power as if Body were child, obeying its master for fear of a beating; ‘as a chyld his master dothe obbaye/…for feyre he schuld be bete’.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Chaps 7–16 of Bartolomaeus Book III deal especially with the workings of the soul in the body.
- 16.
See article by Karen Pratt, this volume.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
British Library Additional MS 37049, fol. 40r.
- 21.
For assertions of the homiletic origins of the genre, see, e.g., Utley (1972, p. 691); Matsuda (1997), pp. 130–146 and 257–258); Reichl (2000, p. 228). For the debates and popular devotion, see Ackerman (1962). Ackerman is almost invariably cited in this context—see, e.g., Raskolnikov (2009, p. 110).
- 22.
- 23.
Ackerman (1962), esp. pp. 549–551.
- 24.
de Irlandia (1926, pp. 62–64); ‘sa was his saule jn sciens and knawlage…tht js richt perfit’. How, when, and on what grounds the transfer from Paradise to Heaven would have occurred in the absence of the Fall is not made clear.
- 25.
In this dispute, unlike most others, the soul is apparently bound for purgatory rather than hell.
- 26.
- 27.
She adds, ‘although they sometimes admitted it was odd.’ The whole of her Chap. 7, “Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei: The Beatific Vision Controversy and its Background” is relevant.
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Maddern, P. (2014). Murdering Souls and Killing Bodies: Understanding Spiritual and Physical Sin in Late-Medieval English Devotional Works. In: Kambaskovic, D. (eds) Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9072-7_3
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