Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

ISBN-13: 9781107036321 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 250 str.

Mary Floyd Wilson

Opis

In this ground-breaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson argues that the early modern English believed their affections and behavior were influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies that coursed through the natural world. These forces not only produced emotional relationships but they were also levers by which ordinary people supposed they could manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. Indeed, it was the invisibility of nature's secrets--or occult qualities--that led to a privileging of experimentation, helping to displace a reliance on ancient theories. Floyd-Wilson demonstrates how Renaissance drama participates in natural philosophy's production of epistemological boundaries by staging stories that assess the knowledge-making authority of women healers and experimenters. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi, Floyd-Wilson suggests that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

Recenzje

'[Floyd-Wilson's] clarity and simplicity of style and wealth of documentation increase her reader's pleasure. This book reminds us that the original, though now rare, meaning of occult is 'secret or hidden'. [The book] focuses on an area between God's Providence and the Devil's interference, where an animate, mysterious natural world challenged early modern men and women to discover its occult secrets.' Barbara H. Traister, Renaissance Quarterly

Spis treści

Introduction: secret sympathies; 1. Women's secrets and the status of evidence in All's Well That Ends Well; 2. Sympathetic contagion in Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women; 3. 'As secret as maidenhead': magnetic wombs and the nature of attraction in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; 4. Tragic antipathies in The Changeling; 5. 'To think there's power in potions': experiment, sympathy, and the devil in The Duchess of Malfi; Coda.