Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750
Subtitle: Literary mountebanks and performing quacks (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)
Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co; Ashgate
Published: August 1, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780754650843
Subjects: History of medicine; Women's studies; c 1500 to c 1600; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; General; Literary Criticism; Europe; European drama; History; History and criticism; Traveling theater; Women in literature
Description: This study offers an interdisciplinary gendered assessment of early modern performing itinerant healers (mountebanks, charlatans and quacksalvers). As Katritzky shows, quacks, male or female, combined, in widely varying proportions, three elements: the medical, the itinerant and the theatrical. Above all, they were performers. They used theatricality, it its widest possible sense, to attract customers and to promote and advertise their pharmaceuticals and health care services. Katritzky investigates here the performative aspects of quack marketing and healing methods, and their profound links with the rise of Europe's professional actresses. Women, Medicine and Theatre also recovers women's roles in the economy of the itinerant quack stage. Women associated with mountebank troupes were medically and theatrically active at every level from major stage celebrities to humble urine sample collectors, but also included sedentary relatives, non-performing assistants, door- and bookkeepers, wardrobe mistresses, prop and costume loaners, landladies, spectators, patrons and clients. Katritzky's study of the whole range of women who supported the troupes contextualizes the activities of their male counterparts and rehabilitates a broad spectrum of diversely occupied women. --From publisher's description.