Download or read book The Notorious Astrological Physician of London written by Barbara Howard Traister and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quack, conjurer, sex fiend, murderer—Simon Forman has been called all these things, and worse, ever since he was implicated (two years after his death) in the Overbury poisoning scandal that rocked the court of King James. But as Barbara Traister shows in this fascinating book, Forman's own unpublished manuscripts—considered here in their entirety for the first time—paint a quite different picture of the works and days of this notorious astrological physician of London. Although he received no formal medical education, Forman built a thriving practice. His success rankled the College of Physicians of London, who hounded Forman with fines and jail terms for nearly two decades. In addition to detailing case histories of his medical practice—the first such records known from London—as well as his run-ins with the College, Forman's manuscripts cover a wide variety of other matters, from astrology and alchemy to gardening and the theater. His autobiographical writings are among the earliest English examples of their genre and display an abiding passion for reworking his personal history in the best possible light, even though they show little evidence that Forman ever intended to publish them. Fantastic as many of Forman's manuscripts are, it is their more mundane aspects that make them such a priceless record of what daily life was like for ordinary inhabitants of Shakespeare's London. Forman's descriptions of the stench of a privy, the paralyzed limbs of a child, a lost bitch dog with a velvet collar all offer tantalizing glimpses of a world that seems at once very far away and intimately familiar. Anyone who wants to reclaim that world will enjoy this book.
Download or read book Dr Simon Forman written by Judith Cook and published by Random House (UK). This book was released on 2001 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Charismatic, volatile and ambitious, Simon Forman rose from a poor country upbringing in Wiltshire, via a slave-apprenticeship in Salisbury and a spell as a servant in Oxford to become one of the wealthiest doctors in London. He was doctor to the giants of the theatre and his 'playbook' contains the first eye-witness accounts of Shakespeare's plays. Like most doctors he also cast horsocopes for all and sundry: from soldiers, courtiers and sailors to women on the look-out for marriage. On the fringes of intrigues at Court, he was linked to Sir Walter Raleigh's 'School of the Night' and to the famous Overbury poisoning case, starring the beautiful Countess of Essex.This lively account of his life sees him denounced as a quack, a crank, and an astrologer who used black magic - yet his meticulous case-notes are now a key source for Elizabethan medicine. Judith Cook also reveals his private life, deciphering, for the first time, his intimate coded diary detailing all his law cases and battles with the establishment and particularly his hectic sex life, a record of promiscuity as vivid as Pepys or Bowell. (One of his affairs was with Elizabeth Lanier, perhaps the 'Dark lady' of S
Download or read book Astrology through History written by William E. Burns and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alphabetically arranged entries cover the history of astrology from ancient Mesopotamia to the 21st century. In addition to surveying the Western tradition, the book explores Islamic, Indian, East Asian, and Mesoamerican astrology. The field of astrology is growing rapidly, as historians recognize its centrality to the intellectual life of the past and sociologists and anthropologists treat its importance in a number of modern cultures. Despite the historical and cultural significance of the subject, most reference works on astrology focus on instructional techniques and are written by astrologers with little or no interest in the history of the topic. This book instead offers an objective treatment of astrology across world history from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. The book provides alphabetically arranged entries by expert contributors writing on such topics as horoscopes, court astrologers, Renaissance astrology, and comets. While it considers the Western tradition, it also treats Islamic, Indian, East Asian, and Mesoamerican astrology. In doing so, it explores the role of astrology in shaping science, literature, religion, art, and other defining cultural traditions. Sidebars offer excerpts from various historical texts, while entries provide suggestions for further reading.
Download or read book William Harvey written by Thomas Wright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1628, the English physician William Harvey published his revolutionary theory of blood circulation. Offering a radical conception of the workings of the human body and the function of the heart, Harvey's theory overthrew centuries of anatomical and physiological orthodoxy and had profound consequences for the history of science. It also had an enormous impact on culture more generally, influencing economists, poets and political thinkers, for whom the theory triumphed not as empirical fact but as a remarkable philosophical idea. In the first major biographical study of Harvey in 50 years, Thomas Wright charts the meteoric rise of a yeoman's son to the elevated position of King Charles I's physician, taking the reader from farmlands of Kent to England's royal palaces, and paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary mind formed at a fertile time in England's intellectual history. Set in late Renaissance London, the book features an illustrious cast of historical characters, from Francis Bacon and John Donne to Robert Fludd, whose corroboration of Harvey's ideas helped launch his circulation theory. After he published his discoveries, Harvey became famous throughout Europe, where he demonstrated his theory through public vivisections. Although his ideas met with vociferous opposition, they eventually triumphed and Harvey became renowned as the only man in the history of natural philosophy to live to see a revolutionary theory gain wide currency. But just as intellectual ideas could be toppled, so too could kings. When Charles I was overthrown during the Civil War of the 1640s, his loyal court physician fell also, and Harvey, an unrepentant Royalist, was banished from London under the English Republic. He died in the late 1650s, a gout-ridden, melancholy man, uncertain of his achievement. A victim of the political turmoil of the times, William Harvey was nevertheless the mainspring of vast historical changes in anatomy and physiology. Wright's biography skillfully repositions Harvey as a man who embodied the intellectual and cultural spirit of his age, and launched a revolution that would continue to run its course long after his death.
Download or read book William Harvey written by Thomas Edward Wright and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published, in a slightly different format, as Circulation: William Harvey's revolutionary idea, in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2012"--T.p. verso.
Download or read book Voices of Shakespeare s England written by John A. Wagner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices of Shakespeare's England offers students and public library patrons over 50 primary documents that illuminate the character, personalities, and events of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Voices of Shakespeare's England: Contemporary Accounts of Elizabethan Daily Life helps readers explore the era that produced, among other things, the world's greatest playwright. It brings together excerpts from over 50 primary documents written in William Shakespeare's lifetime, including letters, literature, speeches and polemics, official reports, and descriptive narratives. Voices of Shakespeare's England includes the works of Shakespeare himself, as well as other poets and playwrights, but it also expands beyond the literary world to cover politics, religion, economics, social change, and the royal court. By allowing Shakespeare's contemporaries to speak in their own voices, it offers an illuminating look at the breadth of Elizabethan society, including major historic events in England as well as Scotland, Ireland, the European continent, and even the new world of America.
Download or read book Female Patients in Early Modern Britain written by Wendy D. Churchill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This investigation contributes to the existing scholarship on women and medicine in early modern Britain by examining the diagnosis and treatment of female patients by male professional medical practitioners from 1590 to 1740. In order to obtain a clearer understanding of female illness and medicine during this period, this study examines ailments that were specific and unique to female patients as well as illnesses and conditions that afflicted both female and male patients. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of practitioners' records and patients' writings - such as casebooks, diaries and letters - an emphasis is placed on medical practice. Despite the prevalence of females amongst many physicians' casebooks and the existence of sex-based differences in the consultations, diagnoses and treatments of patients, there is no evidence to indicate that either the health or the medical care of females was distinctly disadvantaged by the actions of male practitioners. Instead, the diagnoses and treatments of women were premised on a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of the female body than has previously been implied within the historiography. In turn, their awareness and appreciation of the unique features of female anatomy and physiology meant that male practitioners were sympathetic and accommodating to the needs of individual female patients during this pivotal period in British medicine.
Download or read book The Year of Lear written by James Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year--King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn--King Lear--then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. It was a memorable year in England as well--and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation's political and religious leadership. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom. It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear, a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth. He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and concerns: Antony and Cleopatra. The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book"--
Download or read book The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe written by Brian Murdoch and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happened to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from paradise? Where the biblical narrative fell silent apocryphal writings took up this intriguing question, notably including the Early Christian Latin text, the Life of Adam and Eve. This account describes the (failed) attempt of the couple to return to paradise by fasting whilst immersed in a river, and explores how they coped with new experiences such as childbirth and death. Brian Murdoch guides the reader through the many variant versions of the Life, demonstrating how it was also adapted into most western and some eastern European languages in the Middle Ages and beyond, constantly developing and changing along the way. The study considers this development of the apocryphal texts whilst presenting a fascinating insight into the flourishing medieval tradition of Adam and Eve. A tradition that the Reformation would largely curtail, stories from the Life were celebrated in European prose, verse and drama in many different languages from Irish to Russian.
Download or read book Elizabeth s London written by Liza Picard and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liza Picard immerses her readers in the spectacular details of daily life in the London of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603). Beginning with the River Thames, she examines the city on the north bank, still largely confined within the old Roman walls. The wealthy lived in mansions upriver, and the royal palaces were even farther up at Westminster. On the south bank, theaters and spectacles drew the crowds, and Southwark and Bermondsey were bustling with trade. Picard examines the Elizabethan streets and the traffic in them; she surveys building methods and shows us the decor of the rich and the not-so-rich. Her account overflows with particulars of domestic life, right down to what was likely to be growing in London gardens. Picard then turns her eye to the Londoners themselves, many of whom were afflicted by the plague, smallpox, and other diseases. The diagnosis was frequently bizarre and the treatment could do more harm than good. But there was comfort to be had in simple, homely pleasures, and cares could be forgotten in a playhouse or the bull-baiting and bear-baiting rings, or watching a good cockfight. The more sober-minded might go to hear a lecture at Gresham College or the latest preacher at Paul's Cross. Immigrants posed problems for Londoners who, though proud of England's religious tolerance, were concerned about the damage these skilled migrants might do to their own livelihoods, despite the dominance of livery companies and their apprentice system. Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries had caused a crisis in poverty management that was still acute, resulting in begging (with begging licenses!) and a "parochial poor rate" paid by the better-off. Liza Picard's wonderfully vivid prose enables us to share the satisfaction and delights, as well as the vexations and horrors, of the everyday lives of the denizens of sixteenth-century London.
Download or read book Documents of Shakespeare s England written by John A. Wagner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.
Download or read book Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century written by Catherine Armstrong and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a range of seventeenth century literature, including travel narratives, promotional literature, plays, poetry and journals, this book examines the ways in which the geography and nature of the new colonies of North America were represented, both by the settlers themselves and commentators in Renaissance England. This is a valuable addition to literature of colonial history, transatlantic history, and the cultural world of early modern England.
Download or read book Robert Burton s Rhetoric written by Susan Wells and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge. A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
Download or read book Pangs of Love and Longing written by Anders Cullhed and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex relationship between psychic structures, social norms, and aesthetic representations is a challenge for every analysis of the historical manifestations of human desire. Pangs of Love and Longing: Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature sets out to provide a deeper understanding of this relation by an assessment of linguistic and artistic configurations of desire in European literature from Antiquity to the Early Modern period. The aim is to explore historic continuities and ruptures in attitudes towards sexuality, pleasures and bodies, as these are represented in a variety of cultural forms, in order to demonstrate the plurality of premodern desire – and, ultimately, to offer fresh perspectives on our present reality. The seventeen scholars participating in the anthology bring together theories and assessments from different areas of the Humanities – German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and Comparative Literature, History of Ideas and of Art, Theology, Philosophy and Gender Studies. They are all engaged in cross-disciplinary activities at universities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and they all participate in the Scandinavian network “Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature” initiated in 2010.
Download or read book Black Lives in the English Archives 1500 1677 written by Imtiaz Habib and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.
Download or read book A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen written by Carole Levin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women found in these pages are indeed worth knowing and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in the field. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations either by or about the women in the text.
Download or read book Uroscopy in Early Modern Europe written by Michael Stolberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uroscopy - the diagnosis of disease by visual examination of the urine - played a very prominent role in early modern medical practice and in the lives of ordinary people. Widely considered as the most reliable way to diagnose diseases and pregnancies it was taught at the best universities. Leading physicians prided themselves on their mastery in this field. Countless medical writings were dedicated to uroscopy and artists represented it in hundreds of illustrations and paintings. Based on a wide range of textual and visual sources, such as autobiographies, court records, medical treatises and genre painting, this book offers the first comprehensive study of the place of uroscopy in early modern medicine, culture and society and of the - gradually changing - ways in which medical practitioners, lay persons and, last but not least, artists perceived and used it.
