Middle English Mouths

First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

Through new readings of canonical Middle English texts in relation to broader traditions and practices of the body and the senses, knowledge and ethics, this study offers an original contribution towards a history both of the human body and of medieval Christianity.The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.