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Reviewer: Sarah Star
Sarah Star is currently teaching Shakespeare at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and has previously taught Medieval and Early Modern Drama. She recently defended her dissertation, "The Seat of the Soul: Blood and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Literary Culture", at the University of Toronto. Her research argues for a previously unacknowledged intersection among the histories of fourteenth-century literary, medical, and vernacular intellectual culture, showing how medieval texts use a specifically physiological language to represent transformative miracles. These texts also, she argues, do what medicine cannot: they complicate and extend their physiological background in order to represent religious identities, mark religious difference, and explain the inextricability of physical and spiritual life. She has published articles on Chaucer and Middle English romance, and has articles forthcoming on the relationship between early English literature and medicine.