Toronto University Press Research Articles

Illness & Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi by Donna Trembinski

Reviewed by: Illness & Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi by Donna Trembinski Fr. Michael W. Blastic, OFM Illness & Authority: Disability in the Life and Lives of Francis of Assisi. By Donna Trembinski. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. x + 255. $65. In six chapters and a postscript, Donna Trembinski has constructed a very tightly argued study of the role of sickness and disability in the life of Francis of Assisi. Suggesting that both traditional and recent scholarly biographies of Francis have marginalized the reality of sickness in the experience of Francis, and by using recent theories and methodologies of disability studies, she proposes to recenter the illnesses and impairments he suffered in life. She does this through a careful reading of his own writings and the early hagiographies of the saint using the most recent critical editions of these texts available, giving attention to the problems associated with dating, authorship and the relationship between them (Introduction). She is careful not to overstate her conclusions based on these texts (which she often qualifies with "perhaps" or "it seems likely"). Her purpose is not to supply a "forensic diagnosis" (26) as some scholars have tried to do (chapter 1), but to demonstrate how the sources suggest that Francis was sick "for much of his adult life" (35), and to investigate the personal, social and political effect of these disabilities in order to better understand the man Francis of Assisi. In the brief second chapter, she treats Francis's experience of illnesses in his writings and the witness of Brother Leo, his close companion in the last years of his life. Here she points to evidence of Francis' increasing problems with his eyesight which T. suggests limited Francis from acting in "the secular, masculine, ableist realms both in the church and political society" (37). Chapter three turns to the hagiographical sources to chronicle the sicknesses of Francis from his time in prison in Perugia after the battle of Collestrada (1202) until his death (+1226). Here she shows her careful reading of the sources as well as of the secondary literature, and while not every scholar would agree with every historical conclusion, she demonstrates the growing seriousness of Francis' disability as well as the tensions around his illness—for both Francis himself, the order and the church hierarchy—which raised the question of whether he could "effectively lead his order as an infirm man" (84). These tensions also impacted the hagiographers themselves as they tended to spiritualize his sufferings as an example for his brothers and the faithful. In chapter four, T. presents her analysis of the data, framed as a contrast between the needs of Francis's sick body and his rigorous asceticism. She notes the seeming change in Francis's position from his early conviction that sickness should be accepted with patience as God's means of correction (articulated clearly in the Early Rule) to the almost frantic search for doctors who could cure his blindness in the last years of his life, suggesting that it was the church officials who insisted on finding a cure because of the biblical connection [End Page 220] of blindness with sin (86). T. also suggests that this was accompanied by Francis's understanding and practice of obedience which becomes "blind" obedience at the end of his life. Finally, she argues that because of his illnesses, the "leaders in the church and order" might have convinced Francis to withdraw from leadership which Francis himself might have "resented" (107). In chapter five, T. analyzes how the hagiographers had the task of "normalizing [Francis'] life in order to "integrate" it into the church's tradition of sanctity (109). As Francis's hagiography developed from 1228 to 1260, by analyzing Francis's disappearing blindness, the tension between asceticism and medicine, disappearing doctors and the increasing role of guardians, T. concludes that in this process, the real humanity of Francis has disappeared. She overstates the change in Francis, I would argue, when she contends that "His early work suggests an outright hatred of the corporeal body" (115), in contrast to the later hagiographers who suggested that Francis gave great attention to the needs of...

Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics by Tom Keymer

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Johnson in Japan, ed. Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki; foreword by Greg Clingham

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Trauma, Primitivism and The First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett. Joy Porter

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Prix de 2021 du meilleur article de la Canadian Historical Review

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To Share, Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Peter Cook, Neil Vallance, John Lutz, Graham Brazier, and Hamar Foster

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The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660–1790 by Joe Lines

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Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada. Craig Jennex and Nisha Eswaran

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Walter Scott and Short Fiction by Daniel Cook

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Editorial Introduction

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Enlightenment Virtue, 1680–1794, éd. James Fowler et Marine Ganofsky

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The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism. Robert Wardhaugh and Barry Ferguson

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Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World. Flora MacDonald and Geoffrey Stevens

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Corrigendum

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Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas

Reviewed by: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas Andrew Galloway Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xiv + 267 pp. Most readers will need some context to appreciate this study, with its seemingly niche focus on church law and its “reinvention” in the later 14th-century English poetic allegory Piers Plowman. One way to set the stage might be this. Medieval Christian church law has its clearest foundation and articulation in the series of 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-century compendia of old texts and authoritative snippets on the moral principles and divine law that should govern the priestly caste as well as the laity, insofar as the activities of either fall under the categories of the sacraments, the qualifications of the clergy, and the practices risking deadly sin. These weighty books, probably inspired by the recent rediscovery and consolidation of ancient Roman “civil” law (which itself influenced much secular contract and property law), were initially launched with the Decretum compiled c. 1140 by the monk Gratian, followed by commentaries and a series of other authoritative collections commissioned by popes through the following centuries, all aimed at telling the clergy how to bring Christian souls to salvation amid the mortal coils of this world, including the complexities of marriage contracts, penance, usury (and other ill-gotten gains), simony (the commodifying of spiritual goods), and other topics arising from the aspiration of salvation amid humanity’s imperfect condition of sinful desires and private ownership, as well as the condition of slavery and serfdom (although natural law, as Gratian emphasized at the outset, recognized neither servitude nor private ownership). Church law possessed a more international character than any secular legal systems, with its own jurisdictions and courts, but its scope spilled into secular life and literature in many ways. In England, canon law was not only elaborated (as throughout Christendom) by academic Latin glosses and treatises and sermons, on usury and other topics, but also reframed in confessional guides for parish priests and (often university-trained) friars who regularly intervened in pastoral labors. For example, an early 14th-century rector in Berkshire, William of Pagula, produced a series of handy summaries and elaborations of topics from the canonists tailored for the working priest. French and English poems were composed for and sometimes by canons and priests directly involved in “handling sin,” to evoke the title of the Middle English poem Handlyng Synne by Robert Mannyng, an expanded translation of the late 13th-century Anglo-Norman Manuel de pechez. As long recognized, a large part of Piers Plowman’s literary and intellectual matrix derives from the pastoral level of such materials. In Piers, for instance, [End Page 367] the Sins themselves strive to confess to Repentance, with predictably futile but entertaining results. The Sins’ self-indicting statements directly but implicitly respond to the questions found in confessors’ guides. It is also clear, however, that Piers Plowman’s intellectual subtlety and depth go much further upstream in educated and legal learning than this. Many inquiries into its theological, grammatical, and secular legal diction, satire, and allegory have contributed to understanding how subtly Piers Plowman engages both learned and less learned audiences. But no one has previously demonstrated the poem’s pervasive debts to the higher end of canon law noted above, the sprawling panoply of decretal texts and commentaries, and the often technical focuses and presumptions they encompass. Arvind Thomas skillfully positions Piers Plowman amid a number of the canonists’ terms and topics to treat those as both general sources and parallel instances of canonical thinking. That last claim is particularly striking. Thomas shows not only that Piers Plowman invokes, often by silent implication, key concerns of canon law — especially gradations of usury, restitution of ill-gotten gains, and canonists’ criteria for penance in general — but also that the poem approaches such issues as open questions, to be adapted and resolved in ways often quite different from canonists’ emphases, and explicitly applied to non-clerical venues. Thus when Piers Plowman’s author has Conscience associate...

Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist. Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins

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Le rire des épistoliers, XVIe - XVIIIe siècles, dir. Marianne Charrier-Vozel

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Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells

Reviewed by: Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells Timothy Barr Susan Wells. Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN-978-0-271-08467-1. Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6. David Wiles. The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. The works reviewed here celebrate the openness and indefiniteness of rhetoric’s domain by arguing against its assimilation of a disciplinary mode of scholarship. They work from three distinct positions while drawing from the early modem and (mostly) English archive. Susan Wells’s argument for a “transdisciplinary rhetoric” (it is part of the RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) is sustained throughout each chapter of her reading of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, refiguring what Nancy Struever has called rhetoric’s “theoretical insouciance” as its value for playing tavern-keeper at a crossroads of other disciplines’ inquiries. Pauline Reid’s work explicitly targets the boundaries between new media and bibliographic studies by showing how early modem print involved visual modalities beyond the oft-rehearsed oral-print divide. David Wiles offers a fresh perspective by taking counsel for the discipline from a position without one: the professional actor of the early modern English and French stage. Each has a distinct refrain: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and a kind of “undisciplining”—unlearning the trained incapacity of academic theorization. Wells opens her book with an autobiographical note. She first read The Anatomy of Melancholy for her comprehensive exams in the mid-1970s. Although her scholarship did not initially take her into uncovering the allusive world of Burton’s massive work, she describes being impressed by the voice of his prose. It was one “utterly at ease with its learning ... thin, rhythmic, quizzical, the voice of an eccentric and intimate friend” (1). Although such notes are often left in the prefatory material, here it is germane to the work. Reading Wells is to hear her performance of just such a voice witty, opinionated, with an erudition that feels like an inviting gesture at a cherished library rather than the intimidating cage of fingers pressed against the don’s lips in office hours. Wells’s style is part of her argument: like Burton, she is a scholar writing for other scholars, but—also like Burton—she refuses any idée fixe, a symptom of melancholy and today of too academic a discipline. Her second chapter, published in an earlier form in Philosophy & Rhetoric, is a contribution to genre studies. Is a genre like a genus, a category [End Page 325] for an assembling of species? Or, as she argues, is it a kind of space for exchange rather than classification? The Anatomy is a sui generis work. Rather than merely dismissing all the previous scholarship devoted to locating it in a taxonomy—an admittedly “old-fashioned project” (40)—Wells reflects on the underlying metaphors of the field. Even the idea of a “hybrid genre” relies upon the species metaphor (49). Burton identifies his work variously as “satire, as a treatise, as a cento, as a consolatio, or as a drama, satire, and comedy, but not as a satiricocento or a dramatic treatise” (40). His use of genre is often skew, bent to his peculiar and often-changing purposes. He delves into the medical genre of observationes less for clinical knowledge and more for the narrative color and moral insight that these cases might provide. Sometimes he interpolates speech into these stories for dramatic effect, as when in a case of love-melancholy he has the stricken Lady Elizabeth say, “O that I were worthy of that comely Prince ...” (66). Elsewhere he neglects the more florid detail of the original observation in order to make a point. One case tells of “two Germans who drank a lot of wine and within a month became melancholy.” Their symptoms were diverse: one “sang hymns...

Intersection of Gender and Race in P–12 and Higher Education Leadership

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Opponents and Neighbours: Fort George and Buckingham House and the Early Fur Trade on the North Saskatchewan River, 1792 to 1800. Douglas R. Babcock with Michael Payne

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