In his review, Jeremy Citrome insinuates that I’ve plagiarized him (“uncomfortably close parallels to The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature”) because related thematics (selfhood, excrement, the entanglement of healing and hurting, fantasies of bodily wholeness) emerge in our interpretations of late-medieval English medicine and literature. These shared thematics derive from the examination of largely different texts, within a conspicuously unshared overall argument, theoretical framework, and set of particular conclusions, as Citrome acknowledges. It is absurd to imply that this thematic overlap is plagiarism.
I’ve previously served as a book-reviews editor and am currently a journal editor. A policy of simply “letting reviews stand” (as the TMR editor communicated to me) when they contain accusations of professional wrong-doing and unethical behavior is startling. These are accusations that redound directly on my standing as a scholar, not in terms of the quality of my work but in terms of my intellectual honesty. I'm bewildered that evidently no one at TMR took that seriously in the editing process.
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