Porous bodies: plague and conceptions of the human body in Late Medieval England

Ahmadian Attari, Mohammad Sadegh ORCID: 0000-0002-1411-0353 (2023). Porous bodies: plague and conceptions of the human body in Late Medieval England. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the entanglement of humans and a nonhuman agent—Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague—over the course of the second plague pandemic (beginning with the Black Death in 1348 and continuing in subsequent outbreaks) up to the mid-sixteenth century. It studies how this entanglement was understood from a variety of interconnected viewpoints (medical, political, and religious), how people responded to it, and how it impacted pre-existing ideas regarding humanity (inclusive of body and soul) in late medieval England. It traces the impact of plague, in terms of cultural productions, as a force facilitating and strengthening an understanding of the human body as a porous entity.

Chapter 1 considers the chiefly medical responses to plague outbreaks and shows that in explanations of the causes, transmission, and the course of the disease as well as in proposed treatments for it, bodily porousness played a prominent part. This prominence, in turn, bolstered a conception of the body as a porous entity. Chapter 2 considers evidence of public health responses to plague, leprosy, and moral depravity—all of which were understood within the same theoretical framework—and contends that the interaction between plague and discursive understandings of its operation strengthened an understanding of the individual and urban bodies as porous. Chapter 3 studies evidence of the use of prayers and devotions to Christ and a distinct group of saints in order to protect one’s body, the city, or the church space from the ravages of plague, and argues that the emphasis on porousness resulted in the popularity of holy figures whose vitae feature bodily disintegration. Finally, Chapter 4 traces the implications of this emergent way of understanding the emphasis on the porousness of the idealised body as the result of plague presence for how performances of porous bodies may have been understood in dramatic works.

Video abstract:

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Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):