Amy Kenny

Disability Justice in the Church

My Body Is Not a Prayer Request

Kaara L. Peterson

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals’ activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance

This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters across his canon.

Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage

Simon Smith

Jackie Watson

Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. The volume responds to burgeoning interest in the senses from both literary scholars and cultural historians, arguing that early modern ideas about the senses resonate significantly through texts, performances and artworks of the period, even as these art forms themselves provide invaluable suggestions about the place of the senses in early modern culture. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England. This book offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to particular cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in various cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. Authors discussed at length include George Chapman, Sir John Davies, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and Mary Wroth; art forms including drama, poetry, prose, music, dance, pomanders and painting are all the subject of at least one dedicated chapter. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.

Amy Kenny

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