Beyond the body : the boundaries of medicine and English renaissance drama

Resource Information

The work Beyond the body : the boundaries of medicine and English renaissance drama represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Beyond the body : the boundaries of medicine and English renaissance drama

Title remainder

the boundaries of medicine and English renaissance drama

Statement of responsibility

William Kerwin

Creator

• Kerwin, William

Subject

• Drama
• Drama -- history
• England
• English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism
• English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism
• History
• History, 16th Century
• History, 17th Century
• Literature and medicine -- England -- History -- 16th century
• Literature and medicine -- England -- History -- 17th century
• Medicine -- England -- History -- 16th century
• Medicine -- England -- History -- 17th century
• Medicine in Literature
• Medicine in literature
• Physicians
• Physicians -- history
• Physicians in literature
• Renaissance -- England
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"This is a book about two things: medical instability and Renaissance drama. Medical stories are always also social stories, and William Kerwin presents five case studies of how the fragile and dynamic relationship between the medical and the nonmedical played out in Renaissance England. Renaissance drama richly staged that process, presenting medical practitioners in ways that undermined any attempt to imagine them as self-defining. Playwrights consistently unmasked fictions of medical autonomy, emphasizing that a variety of social narratives competed in the shaping of the medical culture." "Drawing on research in the social history of medicine as well as a wide-ranging collection of primary narratives of medical encounters, Kerwin pursues the stories of several medical groups. Specifically, he examines women healers in terms of the changing place of women in the public sphere; the connections between drug sellers - apothecaries and alchemists - and an emerging modern economy; the role barbers and surgeons played in early modern concerns for protecting a new sense of privacy and interiority; the ways physicians defined their professional primacy through the language of theaters and actors; and the ways individual patients employed rhetorics of diagnosis as a way of participating in sectarian religious battles. The study moves from the dynamics of medical politics to the work drama does in exposing those dynamics. In addition to offering astute readings of works by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the book pays substantial attention to plays by Samuel Daniel, John Fletcher, John Ford, Thomas Heywood, John Lyly, Philip Massinger, and John Webster."--BOOK JACKET

Member of

• Massachusetts studies in early modern culture

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

822/.3093561

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PR658.M35

LC item number

K47 2005

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Massachusetts studies in early modern culture