Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians

Exploring the interfaces between healing and performance in early modern Europe, this study focuses on three physicians, the Swiss Platter brothers and their Austrian colleague Guarinonius. Providing the first English language assessment of their substantial theatrical writings, the volume contextualizes these within an overview of the three physicians' medical practice, careers and publications, and of the role of performance in the early modern healthcare economy. Substantial translations of key passages from these physicians' writings, are considered in the light of a wide selection of early modern images and texts relating to healers and performers, many previously disregarded in this context. This allows the volume to locate these theatrical writings in their rightful place in the mainstream of medical and theatre history, thus broadening our knowledge of the interface between healing and performance.

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.