ABSTRACT
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, Edmund Spenser maintains the traces of female narrative ability and its importance to the healing arts. In line with Sidney's emphasis on morality as the righteous basis of poetic invention, Spenser uses the trope of illness to diagnose the kingdom, and to offer remedy through written art. Women, to whom healing duties in a household and even within a village traditionally fell, often had little or no access to formal medical training, nor to the high levels of literacy that medical texts required. With a fluctuating opinion of admiration and derision, Spenser makes use of an officially denigrated oral tradition of medicine and its female practitioners in his poem, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale.
