Papers by Marsha Nicholson
The vast majority of people in early modern England received their medical care either in the hom... more The vast majority of people in early modern England received their medical care either in the home or from practitioners with no formal education or qualifications. In the effort to formalize the practice of medicine into a well regulated and highly regarded profession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the medical establishment launched sustained attacks against these irregular practitioners designed to discredit their skills in the minds of the people using their services. This was not a straightforward task in the complex and diffuse medical marketplace of the period, and overlap between home care and that provided by irregular practitioners complicated the task of vilifying female practitioners in particular. Those on the side of an increasingly corporate professionalization of the industry, the College of Physicians and their supporters, strove to make a clear distinction between charlatan quacks who charged clients for medical care and good woman who dispensed care out of Christian charity.
It is my contention that the establishment’s efforts were hampered by the lived experience of the average person, as well as the positive impression of feminine care left on every child raised by a loving mother. I find evidence of the inconsistency of attitudes toward female practitioners in two plays of the period, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton, and Frances Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Both plays exploit the negative stereotypes surrounding women health care providers, the first a con artist wise woman the second a meddling housewife. But both also ultimately betray a fundamental belief in the reliability and efficaciousness of medical care provided by women.
Performance history of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, with recommendations for a production based o... more Performance history of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, with recommendations for a production based on a hypothetical recreation of the February 2, 1602 Middle Temple Hall premiere performance which will offer comic origins for some of the curious anomalies in Twelfth Night’s text.
Drafts by Marsha Nicholson
The imagery of appetite, consumption, and digestion that saturates Jacobean drama find its most e... more The imagery of appetite, consumption, and digestion that saturates Jacobean drama find its most extreme form in metaphors of cannibalization. This paper will look past those excesses to examine two of the several literal examples of human flesh being treated as foodstuff to determine what these depictions divulge about social anxieties in the period, and the reaction to those anxieties. The first is Middleton and Dekker’s revenge tragedy The Bloody Banquet, which, unsurprisingly, contains the most fully consummated cannibal feast in all early modern drama and manifests the destabilization of society caused by the Protestant Reformation. The second is Fletcher and Massinger’s travel comedy The Sea Voyage, where the feast—attempted but foiled—is a humorous reaction to serious anxieties resulting from England’s interaction with the New World. Because the circumstance, tone, and outcome of these two depictions of cannibalistic behavior are essentially opposite, taken together they give a uniquely broad picture of the functions of dramatizations of cannibalism in literature of the period.
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Papers by Marsha Nicholson
It is my contention that the establishment’s efforts were hampered by the lived experience of the average person, as well as the positive impression of feminine care left on every child raised by a loving mother. I find evidence of the inconsistency of attitudes toward female practitioners in two plays of the period, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton, and Frances Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Both plays exploit the negative stereotypes surrounding women health care providers, the first a con artist wise woman the second a meddling housewife. But both also ultimately betray a fundamental belief in the reliability and efficaciousness of medical care provided by women.
Drafts by Marsha Nicholson
It is my contention that the establishment’s efforts were hampered by the lived experience of the average person, as well as the positive impression of feminine care left on every child raised by a loving mother. I find evidence of the inconsistency of attitudes toward female practitioners in two plays of the period, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton, and Frances Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Both plays exploit the negative stereotypes surrounding women health care providers, the first a con artist wise woman the second a meddling housewife. But both also ultimately betray a fundamental belief in the reliability and efficaciousness of medical care provided by women.