Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare's England

Mining a series of previously uncharted conversations springing up in 16th- and 17th-century popular medicine and culture, this study explores early modern England's significant and sustained interest in the hysterical diseases of women. Kaara L. Peterson assembles a fascinating collection of medical materials to support her discussion of contemporary debates about varieties of uterine pathologies and the implications of these debates for our understanding of drama's representation of hysterica passio cases in particular, among other hysterical maladies. An important aspect of the author's approach is to restore, with all its nuances, the debates created by early modern medical writers over attempts to define the boundaries and resonances of hysterical ailments, which Peterson argues have been largely erased or elided by historicist criticism, including scholarship overly focused on melancholy. One of the main goals of the book is to stress the centrality of gendered concepts of disease for the period and to reveal a whole catalog of early modern literary strategies for representing women's illnesses. Among the medical works discussed are Edward Jorden's central text A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) and contemporary plays, including Shakespeare's Pericles, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale; Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; and Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois.

Kaara L. Peterson is Associate Professor of English Literature at Miami University, USA. She is working on a new project about the portrayal of virginity in early modern literature and art.

Introduction; Chapter 1 1With a few minor alterations, the portions of this chapter discussing King Lear first appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (Spring 2006): 1-22 as "Historica Passio: King Lear, Early Modern Medicine, and Editorial Practice."; Chapter 2 1 An early version of some portions of this chapter appeared as "Shakespearean Revivifications: Early Modern Undead" in Shakespeare Studies XXXII (Fall 2004): 40-66; Chapter 3 "The Ink of Lovers": Revenge Tragedy's Blood Letters; Chapter 4 1An earlier, shorter version of some parts of this chapter appeared as "Performing Arts: Hysterical Disease, Exorcism, and Shakespeare's Theater" in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Burlington, VT and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004) 3-30; epilo Epilogue Hermione's Legacy, or Hysteria after 1700;