ABSTRACT
With a fluctuating opinion of admiration and derision, Edmund Spenser makes use of an officially denigrated oral tradition of medicine and its female practitioners in his poem, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale. In the Tale, Spenser dons the guise of a hard-working but formally unlearned woman who had an informal license to cross the thresholds of humble cottages and noble houses alike, pleasuring and mending minds with her chatter as she worked on ailing bodies. Spenser utilizes this figure’s ability to travel and heal with a spoken “honest mirth” as a curious means of self-promotion, critiquing a literary and political order that he, as a young civil servant in Cork, Ireland, felt to be at the peripheries of by 1591, the year in which the Tale was printed in a volume of other Complaints. The male poet’s appropriation of female orality, written, as he claims in the Tale’s introductory epistle, “in the raw conceipt of my youth,” is riddled with deprecating remarks about knowledges not based in literate learning. Yet through the episodic form of the Tale, I want to suggest, Spenser maintains the traces of female narrative ability and its importance to the healing arts. If we read Mother Hubberd with the historical position of such women in mind, we see how a subtle dignity is returned to women’s medical labor. While such a reading can be useful in piecing together the historical roles of women in medicine, on the literary front, the poem adds “woman’s tale” to Patrick Cheney’s chain of Spenserian generic evolution that ranges from pastoral to epic to love lyric to Augustinian hymn.
