The last few decades shed new light on the links between medicine and literature during the Renaissance, regarding both the history of medical texts (thanks to such notions as epistemic genres, for example) and literature itself (with studies on the use and the role of medical ideas and topics in literature, or on representations of bodies and illness). In this respect, the work of Dorothea Heitsch displays originality in method and in point of view. Indeed, her aim in this book is not to analyze the medical themes in literary works or the role of rhetoric and literary forms in medical texts, but to examine literary works themselves as “medication” (a term that is itself polysemic), in a time when medical knowledge was shared by a humanistic readership and when a new medical literature, based both on theory and practice, blossomed and was widely disseminated.

In this context, Heitsch's book pursues several complex aims. The author intends to contribute to various reflections on the deep interlinking between literature and medicine by addressing the connection between body and soul, and the new place dedicated to the body in the understanding of cognition and emotions in the literary works she chooses to focus on. She also wants to analyze the new consciousness these authors had of being authors, and the way they expressed their inwardness, thanks to the new role of subjectivity shaped by the medical and philosophical discourse. For this purpose, she chooses a textual corpus that may at first seem surprising, since it brings together Hélisenne de Crenne, Rabelais, Maurice Scève, and Du Bartas, as well as Marie de Gournay and Montaigne. However, as Heitsch argues, these texts actually have much in common: the French writers gathered in Writing as Medication are all interested in the question of cognition, are humanistic writers with medical and philosophical knowledge about the mind, belong to what we can call the age of autopsia (etymologically, to see with one's own eyes), are fully conscious of being writers, and contribute to the defense et illustration of the French language. These criteria may appear as an odd assortment, but this choice undeniably allows the author to highlight the emergence of a community shaped by a joint way of thinking and writing, in spite of profound differences. Above all, the most crucial point is that they all have the peculiarity of studying the relation not only between body and soul but also between their own body and their own soul, and of writing a literature they consider to have a “transformative power” (5) on their soul or on their readers’ souls.

With these principles (discussed in a clear and comprehensive introduction) as a framework, the book is structured as a series of case studies. Each chapter (except for the first one) deals with an author and a specific medical question, as apprehended by a particular physician. The author thus analyzes “Female Love-Melancholy: Hélisenne de Crenne, Galen, and the Dolce Stil Novo” (chapter 2); then “Death, Resurrection, and the Anatomy of Epistemon in François Rabelais's Pantagruel,” with reference to the French physician Symphorien Champier (chapter 3); “Renaissance Soul-Searching and Natural Philosophical Poetry,” with studies on Scève, Peletier du Mans, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Bretonnayau (chapter 4); “Constitution of the Female Author,” about Marie de Gournay, in the light of the question of temperaments, alchemy, and gender, drawing on Juan Huarte (chapter 5); and, finally, “Evacuative Strategies in Jacques Dubois and Michel de Montaigne” (chapter 6). This set of chapters is introduced and unified by a study on Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore, whose ideas not only inform the authors gathered in the book, but also provide a wide humanistic readership with a theory of cognition that, according to the author, produces a sort of “sexualization of encyclopaedism” (3).

The heterogeneity of the texts studied and of the medical notions used, and the fragmented reading of the selected works, were potentially risky, but these choices prove to be intellectually very stimulating. The book offers a deep and original insight into the conception of soul and self-consciousness in the late Renaissance and analyzes the way literary discourses played a role in the so-called cognitive turn of the period.