As a precariously-employed instructor who has spent most of this century teaching contractually at a remote Canadian university, I am not part of the current dialogue regarding the field of medieval literature. I was, then, pleasantly surprised when, on April 1, 2021, I received a request from TMR to review Julie Orlemanski’s book Symptomatic Subjects. My name was put forward on the strength of my 2006 monograph, reprinted in 2016, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature. To the best of my knowledge, I have never met Dr. Orlemanski, but I could see we share similar interests. It was heartening to learn that several scholars, some of whom Orlemanski refers to in her footnotes, have since held up my book as important to their own work in Middle English medicine and literature. I took this review as an opportunity to revisit an old passion, medieval surgery, but also to see how the field had developed. I submitted my review in early September after vetting it with a number of tenured colleagues, confident that the Editorial Board would regard it as fair but willing to make any changes TMR requested. As it happens, no changes were requested, and when I next heard from TMR some three months later, it was to notify me about their process for authors who want to respond to a review. Meanwhile, as I am not on social media, I soon heard from colleagues that the author had taken to Facebook and Twitter to express her outrage about the piece, leading her supporters to insist on reading certain phrases in my review euphemistically. It was sad, but not surprising, to see junior faculty whose job it is to teach critical thinking to undergraduates engaging in ad hominem attacks on a reviewer with whom they--or at least those few who had read the piece all the way through--disagreed. Orlemanski took exception to my original wording that her discussions of various themes--she cites “selfhood, excrement, the entanglement of healing and hurting, fantasies of bodily wholeness” as examples--are “uncomfortably close” to my own. While I did not invent these themes, I was the first to discuss them in the specific context of medieval surgery and its intersections with Middle English religious, chivalric, philosophical, and recreational poetry and prose. As such, the lack of engagement with a key text in a very specific sub-field of Middle English studies, one on which very few monographs have been written, represents a major research gap that it is the job of the reviewer to acknowledge; that the book in question happened to be my own was certainly awkward, but this is ultimately immaterial. After all, how many books on the influence of Middle English practical medicine on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular English literature even exist? We can probably count them on two hands. Orlemanski was very much aware of The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature--she herself cites my chapter on Arderne in a single footnote, and without elaboration, or even description, of its argument. Indeed, while the research in this book is very strong on the side of medical history, there is much less acknowledgment of previous work on the literary side of the equation. Nowhere do I accuse Orlemanski of plagiarism, to use her own, unfortunate choice of words. If I insist on anything in this review, it’s that the failure to adequately weigh the importance of previous contributions on the exact same topic is a flaw in an otherwise highly admirable book, but one that diminishes the aspect of dialogue that, as I understand it, is the very essence of university research.
21.12.15 Response: Citrome on Orlemanski on Citrome
