In late medieval and early modern Europe, definitions of blood in
medical writing were slippery and changeable: blood was at once the
red fluid in human veins, a humor, a substance governing crucial
Galenic models of bodily change, a waste product, a cause of
corruption, a source of life, a medical cure, a serum appearing
under the guise of all other bodily secretions, and-after William
Harvey's discovery of its circulation-the cause of one of the
greatest medical controversies of the premodern period. Figurative
uses of "blood" are even more difficult to pin down. The term
appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought, running
through political, theological, and familial discourses. Blood
Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry and draws
together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation.
Theatrical and medical practice are found to converge in their
approaches to the regulation of blood as a source of identity and
truth; medieval civic life intersects with seventeenth-century
science and philosophy; the concepts of class, race, gender, and
sexuality find in the language of blood as many mechanisms for
differentiation as for homogeneity; and fields as disparate as
pedagogical theory, alchemy, phlebotomy, wet-nursing, and wine
production emerge as historically and intellectually analogous. The
volume's essays are organized within categories derived from
medieval and early modern understanding of blood
behaviors-Circulation, Wounds, Corruption, Proof, and Signs and
Substances-thereby providing the terms through which
interdisciplinary and cross-period conversations can take place.
Contributors: Helen Barr, Katharine Craik, Lesel Dawson, Eleanor
Decamp, Frances E. Dolan, Elisabeth Dutton, Margaret Healy, Dolly
Jorgensen, Helen King, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hester Lees-Jeffries,
Joe Moshenska, Tara Nummedal, Patricia Parker, Ben Parsons, Heather
Webb, Gabriella Zuccolin.
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