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Humanities
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New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage
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New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Transdisciplinary Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2022) | Viewed by 5292

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Mary Floyd-Wilson

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Guest Editor
Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
Interests: British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton); drama; early modern literature and culture; feminist historiography; literature and history; literature and religion; literature and science; literature, medicine and culture
Dr. Katherine Walker

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA
Interests: renaissance literature; shakespeare; renaissance drama; early modern epic; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century magic and science; medical humanities

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The prevailing emphasis in critical discussions of Shakespeare and Medicine focuses on the influence of Galenic medicine, the anatomical sciences, and medical professions and texts. While indebted to the innovative scholarship of early modern medicine, this issue seeks to reframe discussions in the field. It is our contention that there is much more to be said about Shakespeare, bodies, and medical thought in early modern England. This is particularly true of scholarship that takes a wider global perspective, adopts new critical methods for examining Shakespearean embodiment, and looks to alternative medical genres to address any of the topics referenced by the key terms listed below.

This special issue of Humanities seeks to interrogate where the field of medical thinking in Shakespeare might go from here. What new theoretical approaches can we take to early modern representations of gender and health, disability, spiritual afflictions, or the global medical marketplace?  Who counts as a medical practitioner?  What constitutes illness or health? How do environments shape human health on the early modern stage? How is gender, sexuality, race, complexion, or class medicalized in performance? We welcome a range of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives.

Prof. Dr. Mary Floyd-Wilson
Dr. Katherine Walker
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Health practitioners
  • Global exchanges
  • Mental illness
  • Gender and health
  • Disability
  • Diseases
  • Spiritual afflictions
  • Therapeutic texts
  • Diet
  • Magic

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 288 KiB  
Article
Fear of the Queen’s Speed: Trauma and Departure in The Winter’s Tale
by Caroline Bicks
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 156; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060156 - 07 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1550
Abstract
The essay applies trauma theory to early modern understandings of grief and its contagious after-effects to provide new ways to think about the figuring of trauma’s reach into individual embodied minds and their environments, and about its larger impacts on narrative structures, theatrical [...] Read more.
The essay applies trauma theory to early modern understandings of grief and its contagious after-effects to provide new ways to think about the figuring of trauma’s reach into individual embodied minds and their environments, and about its larger impacts on narrative structures, theatrical spaces, and the people who populated them. To do so, I turn to Shakespeare’s most deliberately tricky play, The Winter’s Tale, and to its undeniably traumatized Queen Hermione, who defies the laws of time, space, and motion to an extent unmatched by any other human character in his canon. The essay explores how Shakespeare imagines and mobilizes the aggrieved Hermione; and how her departure and repeated, belated returns play out different forms and effects of traumatic response. These include the gaps and eruptions endemic to the processes of accommodating the impossible and listening to stories that are structured around absence and aporia. It is my contention that in his later play he was experimenting with how those effects could spill out beyond the brains and bodies of trauma’s original victims, and transform the people and spaces beyond them. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage)
14 pages, 279 KiB  
Article
Eros and Etiology in Love’s Labour’s Lost
by Darryl Chalk
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060152 - 06 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1226
Abstract
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated [...] Read more.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage)
10 pages, 1897 KiB  
Article
Horses, Humans, and Domestic Bodily Knowledge in All’s Well That Ends Well
by Hillary M. Nunn
Humanities 2022, 11(5), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050121 - 23 Sep 2022
Viewed by 1487
Abstract
Without visual cues, modern viewers may not discern the ways that All’s Well That Ends Well brings together the bodies of horses and humans, asking viewers to consider the physical dependence and sometimes overlapping medical conditions the two species share. Helena’s success in [...] Read more.
Without visual cues, modern viewers may not discern the ways that All’s Well That Ends Well brings together the bodies of horses and humans, asking viewers to consider the physical dependence and sometimes overlapping medical conditions the two species share. Helena’s success in curing the King’s fistula and conceiving Bertram’s child have not been linked to the skills involved in working with horses, let alone the blurring of boundaries between the human and the equine. This is particularly striking given that the play associates both the King and Bertram—the two men she must win over to gain happiness—with images of veterinary care and riding as represented in the era’s household medical and horsemanship manuals. Early modern recipe books provide a valuable glimpse of how seventeenth century viewers might have pictured the interconnectedness of human and animal bodies, in health and in sickness. These books make clear that some cures for fistulas could be used on humans or on horses. Such medicines take as a given the human body’s embeddedness on its surroundings, revealing an essential dependence between humans and horses, often blurring the boundaries assumed to exist between them. The play positions Helena not only as a practitioner of household medicine skilled in caring for humans and animals alike, but also as a subtle and resourceful horsewoman able to coerce others to do her bidding. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage)
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