“I rede þou lerne wel þis of me”: Advice giving in Middle English medical discourse

Advice giving has been one of the main concerns of instructional medical discourse in the history of English. These texts tell their readers how they should behave in order to preserve or regain their health. In this contribution, we focus on the Middle English period up to 1500 with a brief look at some earlier manifestations in Old English. Our data comes from the digital corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT). We approach the speech act of advice giving through a careful analysis of relevant metaillocutionary expressions, i.e. terms that are used to either perform a speech act (performative uses) or to talk about them (narrative uses). In MEMT, only two lexical items are attested, rede, which goes back to Old English and occurs mainly in the older text tradition of remedy books, and counsel, which is more often attested in the specialized texts and in the surgical texts. The examples also show that advice giving in MEMT is not restricted to issues of preserving and regaining health but extends to courteous behavior in the interaction between the medical professionals and their patients.