Sarah Star (University of Toronto, Mississauga), 'Henry Daniel's Visions of Authority'
Abstract:
Dominican Friar and fourteenth-century English medical writer Henry Daniel wrote two encyclopedic medical treatises in Middle English: the Liber Uricrisiarum, a uroscopic manual extant in over thirty-seven manuscript witnesses, and an Herbal, extant in two. Writing medicine in Middle English during this period required Daniel to become a linguistic innovator, as he developed a technical vocabulary in English to communicate medical ideas and terms he had previously encountered only in Latin. This linguistic innovation has guided most of my work on Daniel over the past several years. But how does Daniel himself view authority? What is the relationship between medical and linguistic authority? This talk will analyze Daniel's representation of his relationships with different kinds of sources: learned and lay, men and women, written and oral, and others, as a way of uncovering what Daniel considered to be authoritative medicine and how he saw books as a way to distribute expertise beyond a narrow elite.
Biography:
Sarah Star is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her work analyzes the intersections of literature and medicine in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the ways writers of what we now consider literary texts adopted and adapted physiological theories of blood to construct embodied identities. She co-edited Henry Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition (University of Toronto Press, 2020) with E. Ruth Harvey and M. Teresa Tavormina and edited Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing (University of Toronto Press, 2022). Her first monograph project, for which a proposal is currently under review, is called The Seat of the Soul: A Middle English Medical Poetics of Blood.