MA Literature and Culture PT (360G-Wellcome-213074_Z_18_Z)

My research will use literary material to contextualise the reception of medical texts and diagrams in late medieval Europe. The research refers to medical diagrams found in western manuscripts produced between the 13thC and 15thC named homo signorum (zodiac man). The project argues that this image and the widely-known Galenic humoral theory influenced travel writers in their descriptions of non-European bodies. This medical information was not understood neutrally, and was received as referring to Western, European, male bodies. The research develops the work of Susan Conklin Akbari (2009) and Irina Metzler (1997), contributing towards the emerging recognition within Medieval Studies of prejudiced interpretations and applications of medical theory within medieval literary texts. A medical discourse was developing in the later Middle Ages which conceptualised race as biological. A 13thC scientific discourse claimed that non-European peoples partook in a ‘blood libel’, which involved restoring a natural flux of the melancholic humor through drinking the blood of male Christian children. Medieval understandings of physiology were conflated with literary representations of the deviant non-European body. This research aims to investigate the unbalanced, unhealthy bodies presented within travel narratives, which deviate from the Western-European normative ideal of health interpreted from medical texts and diagrams.