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Tawny Paul. The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 298. $99.99 (cloth).

bodily “symptoms,” those corporeal markers demanding interpretation. Satirical rewritings of medical discourse such as Robert Henryson’s Sum Practysis of Medecyne are shown both to rejoice in and rail against medical jargon’s dual capacity to become, on the one hand, “pure sound” (or poetry) and, on the other hand, empty sound, noise that is as material and corporeal as the body it supposedly references (112). In both instances, medical jargon’s capacity to describe and explain the body is questioned. Exempla are shown to open up similar interpretive cruxes for writers and readers. Like medical writings, exempla constantly negotiate the relationship between individual circumstances and general principles. Layering spiritual, physiological, cosmic, and social causes, they also confuse the legibility of bodily signs so that the spiritual and corporeal and the figurative and literal become difficult to equate or separate. Orlemanski describes both exempla and satire in her introduction as intermediary “literary paths” along which medical discourse traveled “on its way into fictional narrative and poetry” (81). Although the exact nature of the genres’ in-betweenness could be fleshed out more, these chapters provide a useful conceptual bridge to the final four chapters, which explore how individual literary writers manipulated causal matrixes. Respectively, the chapters concentrate on Arcite’s wounded body in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Cresseid’s leprous body in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical and alienated self in the Series, and Margery Kempe’s ruptured, roaring, and crying body. The discussion of Henryson’s Testament helpfully illuminates one way in which the causal logic of exempla might be incorporated into, and further complicated by, fictional narrative. Furthermore, each chapter illuminates afresh aspects of texts that have incited much critical debate; Orlemanski deftly shows that this uncertain play of explanation is often part of the texts’ intended effect and part of a broader cultural understanding of the unstable, indeterminate relationship existing between bodies and selves. The study raises plenty of questions for future scholarship. One issue that might be explored in more detail is how gendered medieval medical writings (such as gynecological texts and texts concerned with “the secrets of women”) interact with other discourses to confuse the legibility of female symptomatic subjects. How, too, do medical discussions of bodies associated with diverse races, religions, and nations interact with coexisting etiological models? Scholars might also think more broadly about the relevance of “bricolage” for medical discourse itself: moving beyond the conceptual focus of etiology, one could ask how else bricolage structured practices of medical reading and textual composition, since medical texts were themselves often piecemeal compilations of interconnecting medical and astrological models. What is clear, then, is that Orlemanski has provided scholars of all kinds of late medieval texts with a vital set of critical tools with which they might newly attend to the uncertain, plural, and fluid relationship between body, self, and other, and to the sustained medieval conversations that took place between literary and medical writings.