Diagnosis and Repair: Reading the Sick Body with Chaucer's Physician and Pardoner

Abstract:This paper theorizes fourteenth-century English metaphors of reading as a medical process, arguing that Canterbury Tales Block C showcases the interplay of the Physician's and Pardoner's two distinct medicalized hermeneutics. Turning to the queer disability politics of Eli Clare and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to unpack the ethical import of such metaphors of reading and repair, I argue that these two tales proffer first the Physician's systematized interpretive strategy of diagnosis and cure before turning to the immoral, anti-cure processes of interpretation offered by the Pardoner. Chaucer's Physician is widely acknowledged as an inadequate reader who fails to account for nuanced spiritual meaning in both his literary and medical practice. I argue that the Physician and his tale reveal the failures of interpretation that reads for harm's "roote" and "boote" (GP, 424–25), and, further, reveal the violence of authoritative cure applied without consent. In this paper's sick/queer lens, then, the Pardoner and his invitation to informed and consensual comfort become a response to such reading methods that seek to organize, cure, and adhere to coherent systems of meaning. Further, nuancing our current understanding of queer reparative practices in the context of chronic illness, the Pardoner's methods showcase the impossibility, at times undesirability, of interpretive repair that pursues wholeness. Refusing medical and spiritual intervention, the Pardoner comes to offer a participatory hermeneutic that prioritizes comfort over wholeness, and a model of care based not on authoritative cure but on iterative consent.