READING DRAFT

Kalamazoo 2002

Louise M. Bishop
Clark Honors College
University of Oregon
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~lmbishop

"Noli me tangere" and a medical recipe: discursive intersections

On folio 56 of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 591--a fifteenth century compendium of astrology, urine and phlebotomy texts, midwifery and horticulture-there appears a recipe with the incipit " Ffor Noli me tangere." [you'll see it at the top of the handout] The recipe goes on to repeat the Latin phrase and to counsel taking oil of wheat and almond to anoint "about it" and "it shall cease." The following recipe, under the rubric "Another", provides a more complex recipe for a drink to address the same "noli me tangere" problem. "Noli me tangere" is, of course, a Biblical phrase: in John 20:17 Jesus says "Don't touch me" to keep Mary Magdalene from touching his just-resurrected body. In the manuscript's fifteenth century recipe, on the other hand, "noli me tangere" refers in context to a woman shy about or resistant to her conjugal duties: the recipe that precedes tells how to "get a man child" as well as a method to discern the barren partner in a couple unable to conceive children. Interestingly, the recipe immediately following the "Noli me tangere" paragraph has been vigorously crossed out; the next legible recipe aims to help a man who is "made", i.e., "mad." I propose that the Latin formula's frames of reference--theological, medical, reproductive, and generational--overlap in significant ways. I propose reading the formula from each of these angles and to analyze their intersections. I wish to bring a literary perspective to material that has not often been read in such a manner. Investigating medieval medical manuscripts with an eye to their gendered assumptions, as well as to our own gendered assumptions about medieval medicine, helps to track shifting ideas about relationships between health and gender while also revealing enduring discursive strategies.

Bodley 591, like all medieval manuscripts, is unique while, at the same time, it includes texts, both Latin and English, which exist in other contemporary manuscripts. Like many 15th-century, primarily English medical manuscripts, Bodley 591 at times pays particular attention to the fact that the book itself is presenting its reader a Latin, rather than an English text [the bit on the bottom half of the first side of the handout], while at other times, from line to line and even from word to word, the manuscript shifts easily between languages. This bilingualism is a much-remarked feature of the corpus of Middle English medical manuscripts and is generally thought to imply bilingual authorship and readership [Voigts, Speculum article]. Folio 56 is entirely in English, with the sole exception of the Latin phrase "Noli me tangere," while the recipes on folio 43, recto and verso, switch between Latin and English, as if the scribe were translating on the spot. However, for the 13 folios that precede the "noli me tangere" recipe, there's been virtually no Latin on the page until the reader's eyes light on the centered title "noli me tangere."

Bodley 591 is rather plain, of a medium or maybe even small size, with about 160 folios. Its hand is unremarkable, and it bears only one illustration, of anal inserters, with a drawing of disembodied legs and buttocks to demonstrate insertion. The manuscript's texts include cosmological commonplaces, such as the moon's phases, an earth-centered universe (analogized to the yolk in an egg), and a wealth of astrological data tuned to humours and seasons. As the manuscript's contents bespeak an interest in the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, so the manuscript serves, at this remove, to present a microcosm of the contexts of literate medicine in the 15th century.

Morals and ethics underlie a number of the manuscript's inclusions, such as the maxim which precedes the manuscript's urines text--"there is more faith in the least star than there is in all the earth; the earth would wish to be a star if it could be." Another recipe with a moral valency is the recipe to cure drunkenness, folio 64r, variously titled "for to keep a man from drunkenness" and "For men that woll be drunken": the cure, by the way, is to wash his hands, feet, and ballocks in cold water. Such readings lean towards the moral and ethical and remind us of the ideological function of texts and the social order they inhabit and support. Human desire must submit to discipline or, as a doctor would term it, a regimen which, unlike cosmological constants expressed in both Latin and English, remains a matter of choice, of will. In its central recipe collection of about sixty folios this Bodleian manuscript, like others of its era, reveals a desire to discipline its society's social and sexual energies.

Recipe collections feature in many 15th-century Middle English medical manuscripts. While MS 591's recipes are not unique since their contents can often be found in other sources, including the Trotula (recently edited by Monica Green), their scrambled contents do provide, on the one hand, a representative slice of an important, almost characteristic feature of Middle English medical manuscripts and, on the other, a unique collection that can be read, first, in relation to other works in the manuscript; next, with attention to their unique arrangement; and finally with an eye to their apparently literary stratum of meaning.

The recipe I'm investigating comes from the least-studied, least-well-identified section of the manuscript. This section, simply called "recipes" in the Bodleian catalogue, provides a number of recipes having to do with conception, genitalia, and secondary sexual differences, such as cures for sore breasts and sore "pyntells". The recipes follow each other with no section markings, nor do they treat the body in a systematic order (recipes for sore breasts show up on folios 50 and 59, while a remedy for a sore "yerdis" appears on folio 74 verso, a recipe for a scalded (or scaled?) pyntell on 55 recto). This recipe collection, placed centrally in the manuscript whether by design or accident, follows an English text on urine and a Latin one on phlebotomy, both of which include what we would consider astrological data. The recipe collection precedes a midwives' manual which is, as its introduction states [on handout], "as it appears written below in Latin." The recipes' attention to cure coheres with other texts in the manuscript. I didn't find a recipe for medieval Viagra, and sexual problems are limited to sore or pocked genitalia, rather than what we would call "sexual dysfunction." Yet all these recipes, in their attention to things like moon phases, recognize the interplay between microcosm and macrocosm found in other of the manuscript's texts. Complementing the Latin midwives' manual and its interest in generational success, Bodley 591 concludes with a horticultural text, completing the manuscript's cosmological and generational circle. Hence, this manuscript reveals the importance its compiler and, by extension, its society accorded sexual behavior and sexual cure. Moreover, its appeal to cosmological constants-the universe as egg, the earth wishing to be a star-ties the sexual to the cosmological, while its proscriptive nature establishes the borders of sexual behavior-what things are open to cure--and may even be said to police those borders.

When we turn to the phrase "Noli me tangere," we find we are thrown, despite the phrase's appearance in a medical manuscript, into a Biblical and exegetical context, one which any reader, but especially a Christian, even a marginally Latin-literate one, would recognize. The dramatic scene of Jesus's resurrection in which this phrase originates features Mary Magdalene. Significantly, the Mary "backstory" tells of a former prostitute who has become one of Jesus's most devoted followers. The exegetical tradition picks up on Mary's history and its implications. Augustine and Ambrose both assert that Jesus's phrase points to the differences between spiritual and fleshly knowledge, and leaves no doubt about which is better. Jesus rejects Mary's touch in order to symbolically reject fleshly sins in general, the "eyes of pride" and "swollen heart" which Ambrose mentions in his exegesis. Identifying the female with sinful flesh in this context doesn't require a great leap: rather, it is perhaps the one theoretical constant virtually no one could argue out of Christianity. The sense of the female identified with flesh achieves an even greater narrative weight when that female, Mary Magdalene, has made her livelihood from carnal relations. The numbers of her images that survive from the Middle Ages, and the popularity of the Mary Magdalene plays from the English mystery cycles demonstrate her importance as a cultural icon. Perhaps the story's popularity results from the fact that her narrative locates a level of erotic interest between her and Jesus that animates artistic production. In the mystery plays, for instance, Jesus's need to discipline Mary's ardor appears in His repeated warnings, and the playwrights underscore her erotic interest in phrases such as "my sweet" and "my love."

Yet, of course, when we think of the phrase in its Biblical context, we find a male Jesus rejecting a female's ardent advances, and the "winner" in the story is Jesus, who succeeds in not being touched. In the medical recipe, the opposite is the case: a female takes the role of rejector yet the recipe's success, its impetus, depends on the male succeeding, via the recipe's potions, in touching the woman in a carnal way. On the one hand, the recipe can be read in this gendered context as simply supporting patriarchal strategies that coerce women's mollification to male desire. On the other hand, a male reader familiar with the phrase's context can't help but remember, at the very least, Jesus himself wishing not to be touched. If that reader has even a passing acquaintance, via sermons, with the general exegetical line on the phrase, that reader will think of the holiness medieval Christianity conferred on chastity, both masculine and feminine. Add to that the Church's approbation of Mary Magdalene for having rejected her sexual past, and the phrase shimmers with sexual ambivalences. Reversed gendered positions-not just male and female but rejecter and suppliant-disrupt any easy reading of the "noli me tangere" recipes. The recipes' title says two things at once: by providing a cure for resistant wives it promotes "touching"; by using that particular Biblical phrase the cure it negates its own advice. The reader, then, is placed in a condition of negotiated understanding without the ability to limit the recipe to an aphrodisiac. Because of the implications of its title, then, the recipe trumps, while it also coheres with, the morality apparent in other, somewhat less fraught, texts in the manuscript.

At the same time, the inspection and dissemination of information about "women's medicine" partake of a feature common to this kind of recipe collection, demonstrating a kind of work that Monica Green argues these texts performed. As she points out in a recent article in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, texts formerly called "diseases of women" are renamed "secrets of women" in the thirteenth century; this shift reveals, according to Green, an invigorated investigation into and policing of the female body to serve dynastic, generational ends. In other words, texts embody male strategies of control aimed at women to make the female body a more compliant, less contested site of production rather than a site of individuality. It is no accident that, in Bodley 591, the "Noli me tangere" recipe is preceded by recipes for conceiving a male child: that is the agenda of revealing the "secrets of women." At least some medical theorists thought that no male child could be conceived without the willing participation of a woman and the pleasurable emission of her own seed, hence the importance of a recipe that helps along her participation. Other recipes can also be read in this regard since sore breasts and hurting penises also impede procreation. Christianity tied sexual behavior to the conscience, as evidenced not only in manuals of sins and penitential material, but in a fair amount of canonized Middle English literature, from Cleanness to Piers Plowman. The interplay among will (volition), sin, and ethical ideas tied to sexual behavior competes with dynastic desires to unveil women's secrets in order to insure dynastic success, for which the generation of male heirs is paramount. Furthermore, the cosmological impulses in Bodley 591's texts help medicine to appear as a theoretical and practical way-station or information booth between cosmos and individual. It is no wonder that such a recipe appears in a medical manuscript that seems organized around the idea of reproduction; the inflections that the phrase "noli me tangere" provides the reader complicate these patriarchal strategies.

In sum, then, what does the "noli me tangere" phrase imply in Bodley 591's recipes? Besides demonstrating the level of interplay between Latin and English that characterizes much Middle English literature, the phrase puts into a different, but related constellation of meaning the erotic energies on which religious narratives are founded, as well as bringing to light a play of gender that some might say characterizes more Middle English literature than might at first appear. Noticing this phrase in this one manuscript (and I'm hoping to find more uses of it) helps us pay some attention to the ways texts in one manuscript that seem quite disparate to us narrate and circulate a complex set of ideas, in this case an ideology of gender and sexual behavior, simultaneously policing the ideology's borders while giving it some room to play. Among the many questions whose answers would further inform our understanding of the phrase's use is the issue of readership. Is there a firm commitment in even some of these recipes to a male or female reader? Current work by Monica Green would indicate that the imagined audience as well as the literal audience for these texts is men. In one respect, that proposal fits the "Noli me tangere" recipe as patriarchal strategy while at the same time the phrase's exegetical background makes a space for gendered play. A phrase identified with Jesus used in a recipe that then defines women with that same phrase identifies Jesus with the female and complicates the male reader's reaction-or, if not his reaction, then at least perhaps his attitude.

When I first read the "Noli me tangere" formula in Bodley 591, I couldn't help but think of the Wyatt sonnet that includes the phrase. The poem, "Whoso list to hunt", on the back of your handout, has prompted two strands of critical inquiry. One traces the poem to a Petrarchan original, citing Petrarch's "Rime sparse" number 190 (also on your handout) as Wyatt's inspiration. The second line of inquiry suggests that Wyatt uses his familiarity with Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII's pursuit of her as the sonnet's "backstory." This second reading quite logically portrays Ann as the collared deer, and Henry as Caesar. The phrase "Noli me tangere" provides a link between these two strands of analysis and inflects the poem with concerns about volition tied to fecundity, as in Bodley 591's recipe.

Many of us read in our Norton Anthologies the editors' notes on Wyatt's sonnet which point out (1) that Petrarch used Italian, not Latin, for his "Do not touch" motto, and (2) that the English poet, by turning one part of Petrarch's phrase into Latin, alludes to the passage in the gospel of John, the exegesis on which also inflects Bodley 591's recipes. Editors also note that Petrarch's commentators flesh out Petrarch's allusion to a deer with an engraved collar, but often do not tell the commentators' story. For the commentators, the deer collar story doesn't emphasize ownership or fidelity as Wyatt's allusion does. Rather, the commentators recount a story from Pliny about a deer found bearing a collar announcing Alexander the Great's ownership of it 100 years after Alexander's death. The deer and its collar, then, evidence long life, rather than romance or even virility, except by virility's association with ageless vigor. Interestingly, Roger Bacon, or at least a text attributed to him in his De retardatione accidentium senectutis, also recounts this story, but his version tells of a stag said to have been found bearing a collar marked, not by Alexander, but by Julius Caesar. In both instances the mini-narrative associated with a deer and its collar indicates the magic or medicine associated with long life, which calls to mind the medieval medicament much prized by medieval apothecaries, stag heart cartilage, which was thought to extend and preserve life and was also put into the vulva of pregnant women to help with childbirth (my thanks to Carol Everest for this intriguing connection).

How much Wyatt in his poem is using Petrarch or his commentators, let alone Roger Bacon, is a matter of debate, and the poem's allusions to Henry and Ann are no settled matter either. If we allow Bodley 591's recipe to affect our historically-alert reading of Wyatt's poem, then we might see Wyatt cleverly and subtly alluding to Ann and Henry's romance with a kind of inside knowledge. Contemporary sources reveal that Ann Boleyn played the "dangerous" woman, in the medieval sense of "resistant," in Henry's romantic drama with her, a romantic drama inescapably inflected by Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon. In this respect, then, Ann's "untouchability"-which seems to have been under her control to such an extent that only when Henry had virtually achieved his divorce did she allow herself to be touched-figures in the poem's use of the phrase, even as it also represents the powerful patriarchal ownership rights of men. At the same time, moreover, we remember that Henry's raison d'etre for his divorce from Katherine was his dynastic desire for a male heir, no longer a possibility with his current wife. If the "noli me tangere" phrase had, through its medical context, achieved a relationship with dynastic, reproductive desires, then Wyatt's use of it also knowingly points to a powerful complex of sexual as well as reproductive desires still charged with that little shock-a shock I suggest affected the medical readers of Bodley 591-of recognition that the phrase originally belongs to Jesus. In this way the poem could be thought to retain the discursive ambivalences apparent in Bodley 591, and provides another link for our considering the tangled relationships, figured in literature, between the medieval and the Early Modern.

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