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The Sorbonnic Trots: Staging the Intestinal Distress of the Roman Catholic Church in French Reform Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jeff Persels
Jeff Persels*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
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Abstract

This essay surveys the use of metaphors of illness, specifically those of constipation and diarrhea, in vernacular French Evangelical and Calvinist polemical theater of the 1520s and 30s (Berquin, Malingre, Marguerite d'Angoulême) through the 1560s (Badius). It considers the relatively frequent reference to staging of diagnosis, treatment, and cure in the context of contemporary medical belief and practice, and observes a shift in emphasis from optimistic prognosis and successful therapy of the earlier Evangelical period to negative pronouncement of imminent (and deserved) death in the later Calvinist or Huguenot period at the start of the Wars of Religion.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , Winter 2003 , pp. 1089 - 1111
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2003

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Footnotes

*

An early version of this article was given as a paper at the 2000 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Cleveland, OH. I wish to thank the following for source suggestions, constructive advice, and translations of German material: Mary McKinley, Joseph Tate, Russell Ganim, George Hoffmann, Josef Schmidt, Eva Sanger, Anne Schutte, Karen James, my colleagues in French at the University of South Carolina, the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia, and the Yale University Harvey Cushing / John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

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