Louise Bishop: Words, Stones & Herbs

UO scholar and CSWS Executive Committee member Louise Bishop explores the healing power of words in her recent book, Words, Stones & Herbs (Syracuse University Press).  In a presentation sponsored by the CSWS Healing Arts Research Interest Group, Bishop will talk about her book, which looks at the role of word and gender in healing, healing and the vernacular, and other aspects of poetry, language and metaphor in the healing arts of medieval and early modern England.

Louise Bishop is associate professor of literature and associate dean, Clark Honors College.

Place: Center for the Study of Women in Society

330 Hendricks Hall

Jane Grant Conference Room

Professor Bishop will trace the medical, theological, and popular uses of noli me tangere, “touch me not,” to situate and unmoor the phrase from its place on a remedybook’s page.  She  argues for a discursive relationship—highly material, eminently bodied, fully social, narratively pious, complexly gendered—between the disease name as it appears in a remedybook and the cultural resonances afforded by the phrase’s Biblical echo.  A Latin phrase can take on a range of meanings in vernacular contexts. Catching the shadow of Mary Magdalene, patron saint of apothecaries, in Bodley 591’s recipe opens a space for other ways to read and contextualize Middle English remedybooks.  Read in this fashion, the phrase noli me tangere enacts one of Rubin’s “creative moments” that “allows us to touch medieval bodies” (Miri Rubin) that were themselves touched by reading that heals.

Read the story about Professor Bishop in the Daily Emerald.