Men and women in early modern Europe experienced their bodies very differently from the ways in which contemporary men and women do. In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Paster examines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean...

Reading the Early Modern Passions Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion Edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson "Thanks to the collection as a whole, the complex history of the passions in the early modern mind and body will now take a more prominent place in our study of the literature, art, and music of the period."--MLR "Provides an engaging and extremely useful introduction to historicized explorations of the early modern passions through the lens of the creative arts."--Sixteenth Century Journal How translatable is the language of the emotions...

Michaelmas Term is one of five satiric city comedies that the young playwright Thomas Middleton wrote for the boy players of St Paul's Cathedral, sometime before 1607. Set in a vividly detailed, realistic urban milieu at the start of London's social season, the play comes alive through the central contest between Ephestian Quomodo, an ambitious, land-hungry city merchant, and Richard Easy, a naive landowning gallant just arrived in the city. Easy is soon deep in debt and his struggle to recoup his debts and reclaim his land from Quomodo takes places against a sharply drawn set of London types...

This edition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by four sets of primary documents and illustrations thematically arranged to offer a richly textured understanding of early modern culture and Shakespeare's work within that culture. The texts, including facsimiles of period documents, conduct literature, county records, reports of court entertainments, and Queen Elizabeth's speeches, contextualize the play's treatment of popular and royal festivity, communities of women (including Amazons, gossips, and nuns), marriage...

Gail Kern Paster explores the role of the city in the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson. Paster moves beyond the usual presentation of the city-country dichotomy to reveal a series of oppositions that operate within the city's walls.

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body, "Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.
Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories,...