By: Jonathan Gil Harris, Stephen Orgel (Editor), Anne Barton (Editor), Jonathan Dollimore (Editor), Marjorie Garber (Editor)

Paperback

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Jonathan Gil Harris examines the origins of modern discourses of social pathology in Elizabethan and Jacobean medical and political writing. Plays, pamphlets and political treatises of this period display an increasingly xenophobic tendency to attribute England's ills to 'foreign bodies' such as Jews, Catholics and witches, as well as treat their allegedly 'poisonous' features for the health of the body politic. Harris argues that this tendency resonates with two of the distinctive paradigms of Paracelsus' pharmacy which also includes the notion that poison has a medicinal power. The emergence of these paradigms in early modern English political thought signals a decisive shift from Galenic humoral tradition towards twentieth-century politico-medical discourses of 'infection' and 'containment', which, like their early modern predecessors, make mysterious the domestic origins of social conflict and the operations of political authority.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
Introduction: functionalist organicism and the origins of social pathology
Pathologizing the Body Politic
'Enter at the least pore': early modern medicine and bodily infiltration
'Ev'ry poison good for some use': the poisonous political pharmacy and its discontents
Handy-Dandy, Which is the Justice, Which is the Thief?
Public enemas: the disjunctions of the excremental Jewish pharmakon
'To stop her mouth with Truth's authority': the poisonous tongue of the witch and the word of God
Conclusion: the persistence of the pathological body politic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 9780521034685
ISBN-10: 052103468X
Series: Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture
Audience: Professional
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 216
Published: 14th December 2006
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Dimensions (cm): 22.8 x 15.2  x 1.3
Weight (kg): 0.32