The Medieval Hospital - (Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern) by Nicole R Rice (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.0Rice 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Remarkably written and researched and refreshingly argued, The Medieval Hospital should be the model to which hospital and literary historians turn." --Isis

"In a masterful study of the inner workings of hospital reading communities and their influence on the social environments around them, Rice provides a view of a literary culture rarely seen; she introduces us to members of the community whose names we may never have heard before; but most importantly...she provides evidence for literary practices that demonstrate the core principles of premodern healthcare--support for the poor and disenfranchised as well as care for both body and soul through reading, writing, copying, compiling, and conversing about a diverse collection of stimulating texts." --Speculum

"In this magisterial new book, Nicole Rice musters a wealth of interdisciplinary expertise in order to establish the 'literary-cultural function' of the medieval hospital, a surprisingly robust and prolific engine of textual production and practice."--Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"Rice's sources are wide-ranging in genre, form, and content, as befits the institutional motility that is her central concern. The result is a richly illuminating and meticulously researched study that will be of great interest to general readers and specialists alike."--The Review of English Studies

"In its study of these medical/spiritual institutions and individuals, The Medieval Hospital offers a perspective not previously employed and thus makes an important contribution to the history of reading." --Mary C. Erler, author of Reading and Writing during the Dissolution

"In this pathbreaking study, Nicole Rice excavates the urban hospital's contributions to literary and performative cultures in medieval England. This book merits the attention of everyone interested in the processes of loss, negotiation, and reinvention that mark the relationship of medieval and early modern in English culture and history." --Theresa Coletti, author of Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints

About the Author

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).