Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter

While the writings of early modern medical practitioners habitually touch on performance and ceremony, few illuminate them as clearly as the Protestant physicians Felix Platter and Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied in Montpellier and practiced in their birth town of Basle, or the Catholic physician Hippolytus Guarinonius, who was born in Trent, trained in Padua and practiced in Hall near Innsbruck. During his student years and brilliant career as early modern Basle's most distinguished municipal, court and academic physician, Felix Platter built up a wide network of private, religious and aristocratic patients. His published medical treatises and private journal record his professional encounters with them as a healer. They also offer numerous vivid accounts of theatrical events experienced by Platter as a scholar, student and gifted semi-professional musician, and during his Grand Tour and long medical career. Here Felix Platter's accounts, many unavailable in translation, are examined together with relevant extracts from the journals of his younger brother Thomas Platter, and Guarinonius's medical and religious treatises. Thomas Platter is known to Shakespeare scholars as the Swiss Grand Tourist who recorded a 1599 London performance of Julius Caesar, and Guarinonius's descriptions of quack performances represent the earliest substantial written record of commedia dell'arte lazzi, or comic stage business. These three physicians' records of ceremony, festival, theatre, and marketplace diversions are examined in detail, with particular emphasis on the reactions of 'respectable' medical practitioners to healing performers and the performance of healing. Taken as a whole, their writings contribute to our understanding of many aspects of European theatrical culture and its complex interfaces with early modern healthcare: in carnival and other routine manifestations of the Christian festive year, in the extraordinary performance and ceremony of court festivals, and above all in the rarely welcomed intrusions of quacks and other itinerant performers.

M.A. Katritzky is the Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies in the English Department of The Open University, UK, and author of The Art of Commedia: A study in the commedia dell'arte 1560-1620 with special reference to the visual records (2006) and Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (2007).

Contents: Part I Introduction: Healing performance and ceremony in the writings of three physicians; The brothers Felix Platter (1536-1614) and Thomas Platter (1574-1628); Hippolytus Guarinonius (1571-1654). Part II Ceremony and Festival: 'Christian fools with varnish'd faces'; Jewish traditions and ceremonies in Montpellier and Avignon; Physicians at court festivals; Commedia dell'arte costumes at a German court wedding of 1598. Part III Healers and Performers: Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare and English actors in Europe; Marketplace healers and performers; Medicine, magic and superstition; Performing monsters. Part IV Performing Healing: Commedia dell'Arte Quack Troupes: A new identification for 'Zan Bragetta': Giovanni Paulo Alfieri; Quack performances in Guarinonius's Grewel; Marketing medicine, exemplifying folly: lazzi and the deadly sins; Physical, mental and spiritual; health: stage fools in a medical treatise. Part V Source Texts: Felix Platter: the 1598 wedding of Johann Georg, Count of Hohenzollern and Franziska, Countess of Salm; Thomas Platter in Avignon: Jewish life and a performing quack troup in 1598; Hippolytus Guarinonius's Grewel: 35 commedia dell'arte lazzi; Bibliography; Index.