Download or read book Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature written by Bryon Lee Grigsby and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature written by Byron Lee Grigsby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature examines three diseases--leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis--to show how doctors, priests, and literary authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance interpreted certain illnesses through a moral filter. Lacking knowledge about the transmission of contagious diseases, doctors and priests saw epidemic diseases as a punishment sent by God for human transgression. Accordingly, their job was to properly read sickness in relation to the sin. By examining different readings of specific illnesses, this book shows how the social construction of epidemic diseases formed a kind of narrative wherein man attempts to take the control of the disease out of God's hands by connecting epidemic diseases to the sins of carnality.

Download or read book Plague Writing in Early Modern England written by Ernest B. Gilman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.

Download or read book The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England written by Kathleen Miller and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the literary culture that emerged during and in the aftermath of the Great Plague of London (1665). Textual transmission impacted upon and simultaneously was impacted by the events of the plague. This book examines the role of print and manuscript cultures on representations of the disease through micro-histories and case studies of writing from that time, interpreting the place of these media and the construction of authorship during the outbreak. The macabre history of plague in early modern England largely ended with the Great Plague of London, and the miscellany of plague writings that responded to the epidemic forms the subject of this book.

Download or read book Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry written by Eve Salisbury and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring medical writing in England in the 100+ years after the advent of the “Great Mortality”, this book examines the storytelling practices of poets, patients, and physicians in the midst of a medieval public health crisis and demonstrates how literary narratives enable us to see a kinship between poetry and the healing arts. Looking at how we can learn to diagnose a text as if we were diagnosing a body, Salisbury provides new insights into how we can recuperate the voices of those afflicted by illness in medieval texts when we have no direct testimony. She considers how we interpret stories told by patients in narratives mediated by others, ways that women factor into the shaping of a medical canon, how medical writing intersects with religious belief and memorial practices governed by the Church, and ways that regimens of health benefit a population in the throes of an epidemic.

Download or read book Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is not only the final moment of life, it also casts a huge shadow on human society at large. People throughout time have had to cope with death as an existential experience, and this also, of course, in the premodern world. The contributors to the present volume examine the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, studying specific buildings and spaces, literary works and art objects, theatrical performances, and medical tracts from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Death has always evoked fear, terror, and awe, it has puzzled and troubled people, forcing theologians and philosophers to respond and provide answers for questions that seem to evade real explanations. The more we learn about the culture of death, the more we can comprehend the culture of life. As this volume demonstrates, the approaches to death varied widely, also in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. This volume hence adds a significant number of new facets to the critical examination of this ever-present phenomenon of death, exploring poetic responses to the Black Death, types of execution of a female murderess, death as the springboard for major political changes, and death reflected in morality plays and art.

Download or read book The Plague in Print written by Rebecca Totaro and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Plague in Print, Rebecca Totaro takes the reader into the world of plague-riddled Elizabethan England, documenting the development of distinct subgenres related to the plague and providing unprecedented access to important original sources of early modern plague writing. Totaro elucidates the interdisciplinary nature of plague writing, which raises religious, medical, civic, social, and individual concerns in early modern England. Each of the primary texts in the collection offers a glimpse into a particular subgenre of plague writing, beginning with Thomas Moulton’s plague remedy and prayers published by the Church of England and devoted to the issue of the plague. William Bullein’s A Dialogue, both pleasant and pietyful, a work that both addresses concerns related to the plague and offers humorous literary entertainment, exemplifies the multilayered nature of plague literature. The plague orders of Queen Elizabeth I highlight the community-wide attempts to combat the plague and deal with its manifold dilemmas. And after a plague bill from the Corporation of London, the collection ends with Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year, which illustrates plague literature as it was fully formed, combining attitudes toward the plague from both the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. These writings offer a vivid picture of important themes particular to plague literature in England, providing valuable insight into the beliefs and fears of those who suffered through bubonic plague while illuminating the cultural significance of references to the plague in the more familiar early modern literature by Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, and others. As a result, The Plague in Print will be of interest to students and scholars in a number of fields, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, cultural studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Pestilence Pandemics and Plagues 2 volumes written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.

Download or read book After the Black Death Second Edition written by George Huppert and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-22 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: "To give a sense of immediacy and vividness to the long period in such a short space is a major achievement." --History "Huppert's book is a little masterpiece every teacher should welcome." --Renaissance Quarterly A work of genuine social history, After the Black Death leads the reader into the real villages and cities of European society. For this second edition, George Huppert has added a new chapter on the incessant warfare of the age and thoroughly updated the bibliographical essay.

Download or read book Representing the Plague in Early Modern England written by Rebecca Totaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

Download or read book Gender in Medieval Culture written by Michelle M. Sauer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in Medieval Culture provides a detailed examination of medieval society's views on both gender and sexuality, and shows how they are inextricably linked. Sex roles were clearly defined in the medieval world although there were exceptions to the rules, and this book examines both the commonplace world view and the exceptions to it. The volume looks not only at the social and economic considerations of gender but also the religious and legal implications, arguing that both ecclesiastical and secular laws governed behaviour. The book covers key topics, including femininity and masculinity and how medieval society constructed these terms; sexuality and sex; transgressive sexualities such as homosexuality, adultery and chastity; and the gendered body of Christ, including the idea of Jesus as mother and affective spirituality. Using a clear chapter structure for easy navigation and categorisation, as well as a glossary of terms, the book will be a vital resource for students of medieval history.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Black Death written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia provides 300 interdisciplinary, cross-referenced entries that document the effect of the plague on Western society across the four centuries of the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors. Encyclopedia of the Black Death is the first A–Z encyclopedia to cover the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors and effects in Europe and the Islamic world from 1347–1770. It also bookends the period with entries on Biblical plagues and the Plague of Justinian, as well as modern-era material regarding related topics, such as the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the Third Plague Pandemic of the mid-1800s, and plague in the United States. Unlike previous encyclopedic works about this subject that deal broadly with infectious disease and its social or historical contexts, including the author's own, this interdisciplinary work synthesizes much of the research on the plague and related medical history published in the last decade in accessible, compellingly written entries. Controversial subject areas such as whether "plague" was bubonic plague and the geographic source of plague are treated in a balanced and unbiased manner.

Download or read book The Plague Epic in Early Modern England written by Rebecca Totaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 presents together, for the first time, modernized versions of ten of the most poignant of plague poems in the English language - each composed in heroic verse and responding to the urgent need to justify the ways of God in times of social, religious, and political upheaval. Showcasing unusual combinations of passion and restraint, heart-rending lamentation and nation-building fervor, these poems function as literary memorials to the plague-time fallen. In an extended introduction, Rebecca Totaro makes the case that these poems belong to a distinct literary genre that she calls the 'plague epic.' Because the poems are formally and thematically related to Milton's great epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this volume represents a rare discovery of previously unidentified sources of great value for Milton studies and scholarly research into the epic, didactic verse, cultural studies of the seventeenth century, illness as metaphor, and interdisciplinary approaches to illness, natural disaster, trauma, and memory.

Download or read book Disease and Society in Premodern England written by John Theilmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disease and Society in Premodern England examines the impact of infectious disease in England from the everyday to pandemics in the period c. 500–c. 1600, with the major focus from the eleventh century onward. Theilmann blends historical research, using a variety of primary sources, with an understanding of disease drawn from current scientific literature to enable a better understanding of how diseases affected society and why they were so difficult to combat in the premodern world. The volume provides a perspective on how society and medicine reacted to "new" diseases, something that remains an issue in the twenty-first century. The "new" diseases of the Late Middle Ages, such as plague, syphilis, and the English Sweat, are viewed as helping to lead to a change in how people viewed disease causation and treatment. In addition to the biology of disease and its relationship with environmental factors, the social, economic, political, religious, and artistic impacts of various diseases are also explored. With discussions on a variety of diseases including leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, typhus, influenza, and smallpox, this volume is an essential resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of medicine and disease in premodern England.

Download or read book The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages written by Katelynn Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.

Download or read book Daily Life during the Black Death written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-08-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daily life during the Black Death was anything but normal. When plague hit a community, every aspect of life was turned upside down, from relations within families to its social, political, and economic stucture. Theaters emptied, graveyards filled, and the streets were ruled by the terrible corpse-bearers whose wagons of death rumbled day and night. Daily life during the Black Death was anything but normal. During the three and a half centuries that constituted the Second Pandemic of Bubonic Plague, from 1348 to 1722, Europeans were regularly assaulted by epidemics that mowed them down like a reaper's scythe. When plague hit a community, every aspect of life was turned upside down, from relations within families to its social, political and economic structure. Theaters emptied, graveyards filled, and the streets were ruled by terrible corpse-bearers whose wagons of death rumbled night and day. Plague time elicited the most heroic and inhuman behavior imaginable. And yet Western Civilization survived to undergo the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and early Enlightenment. In Daily Life during the Black Death Joseph Byrne opens with an outline of the course of the Second Pandemic, the causes and nature of bubonic plague, and the recent revisionist view of what the Black Death really was. He presents the phenomenon of plague thematically by focusing on the places people lived and worked and confronted their horrors: the home, the church and cemetary, the village, the pest houses, the streets and roads. He leads readers to the medical school classroom where the false theories of plague were taught, through the careers of doctors who futiley treated victims, to the council chambers of city hall where civic leaders agonized over ways to prevent and then treat the pestilence. He discusses the medicines, prayers, literature, special clothing, art, burial practices, and crime that plague spawned. Byrne draws vivid examples from across both Europe and the period, and presents the words of witnesses and victims themselves wherever possible. He ends with a close discussion of the plague at Marseille (1720-22), the last major plague in northern Europe, and the research breakthroughs at the end of the nineteenth century that finally defeated bubonic plague.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science written by Howard Marchitello and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.