Desire and Defacement In The Testament of Cresseid

Abstract

“Leprosy,” wrote Bernard of Gordon in his 1305 Lilium Medicinae, is a disease “corrupting the figure and the form and the composition of the body’s parts and finally dissolving [the body’s] wholeness” [corrumpens figuram et formam et compositionem membrorum et finaliter solvens continuitatem].1 The Montpellier physician’s influential definition illustrates how the language of form consistently inflects medieval discussions of leprosy. Guy de Chauliac, surgeon and physician to the popes at Avignon, described leprosy as an affliction “by the whiche the fourme (i. schappe) is corupte in alle the body [qua forma corrumpitur in toto].” Guy offered a particularly vivid image of the disease’s ravaging in his etymology for lepra, which “is saide of the worde lupus, a wolfe, for it devoureth alle the membres as a wolf doth. It roteth forsothe all the membres as a cancrouse wolf” [dicitur a lupo, quia omnia membra ut lupus cancrosus, devorat; corrumpit enim omnia membra ut lupus cancrosus].2 In the ordering of medieval medical encyclopedias, leprosy tended to appear among skin conditions, but it was understood not as a superficial affliction but a devastation of the entire organism—a “cancer communis corpori toti,” as it was called in Avicenna’s Canon. 3 Forma, figura, compositio, and bodily continuitas are all prey to leprosy’s “devouring.”

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