Nicole R. Rice

The Medieval Hospital (eBook, ePUB)

Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350-1550

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Nicole Rice's original study analyzes the role played by late medieval English hospitals as sites of literary production and cultural contestation.

The hospitals of late medieval England defy easy categorization. They were institutions of charity, medical care, and liturgical commemoration. At the same time, hospitals were cultural spaces sponsoring the performance of drama, the composition of medical texts, and the reading of devotional prose and vernacular poetry. Such practices both reflected and connected the disparate groups-regular religious, ill and poor people, well-off retirees-that congregated in hospitals. Nicole Rice's The Medieval Hospital offers the first book-length study of the place of hospitals in English literary history and cultural practice.

Rice highlights three English hospitals as porous sites whose practices translated into textual engagements with some of urban society's most pressing concerns: charity, health, devotion, and commerce. Within these institutions, medical compendia treated the alarming bodies of women and religious anthologies translated Augustinian devotional practices for lay readers. Looking outward, religious drama and socially charged poetry publicized and interrogated hospitals' caring functions within urban charitable economies. Hospitals provided the auspices, audiences, and authors of such disparate literary works, propelling these texts into urban social life. Between ca. 1350 and ca. 1550, English hospitals saw massive changes in their fortunes, from the devastation of the Black Death, to various fifteenth-century reform initiatives, to the creeping dissolutions of religious houses under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This volume investigates how hospitals defined and defended themselves with texts and in some cases reinvented themselves, using literary means to negotiate changed religious landscapes.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. April 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780268205102
• Artikelnr.: 67601702

Autorenporträt

Nicole R. Rice is professor of English at St. John's University, author of a number of books and essays, and co-author of The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

Inhaltsangabe

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: English Hospitals as Spiritual, Medical, and Literary
Communities
1. St. Leonard's Hospital, Civic Drama, and Women's Devotion
2. Corruption and Purification at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London: The
Book of the Foundation and John Mirfield's Compilations
3. Lay Reading in St. Bartholomew's Hospital Close: John Shirley's Final
Anthology
4. Collaborative Devotional Reading at St. Bartholomew's and St. Mark's
5. Poverty, Charity, and Poetry: Critique and Reform Before the Dissolution
6. Dissolution, Disappearance and Refoundation: Textual Strategies of
Reconstitution
Epilogue: Rites for the Dead and the End of Purgatory, 1540-52
Bibliography