As a subgenre of the Arabic medical literature of the Islamic Middle Period, the self-treatment compendia seem to have escaped the notice of contemporary scholarship. Meant for domestic use by Arabic-speaking, cultured urbanites, the compendia dealt with the cure and prevention of diseases. As such, they promoted a well-defined set of concepts and, at the same time, reflected medicine-related convictions, knowledge, and intellectual tradition prevailing not only among physicians, but also among educated non-professionals. While taking into consideration a number of Arabic-Islamic self-treatment compendia, the chapter focuses on two specific texts, one of which was written in fourteenth-century Cairo. The provenance of the other cannot be securely defined. The analysis of the manuals’ texts is focused, above all, on investigating cultural and intellectual influences which, through the transfer and assimilation of drugs and drug-related ideas, contributed to shaping the overall medico-pharmaceutical culture of the Mamluk Near East.

Margaret Cavendish thought of her work as her “childe,” perhaps compensating for her own lack of biological children with her conceptions of nature. In her early works, she claimed that she was too modest to examine the nature of procreation, but later investigates the ideas of both ancients and moderns about the physical and metaphysical aspects of generation. She criticized William Harvey’s biology and understood the possible sexual implications of Robert Boyle’s experimentation with the air-pump. Her developed natural philosophy, that everything was composed of matter in motion, allowed her to advance a non-sexed and non-gendered account of generation. The unitary asexual substratum of matter could allow a man to become a woman, or a woman a man; such gender fluidity was possible because of the diversity of matter and its capacity to change due to particular circumstances. Consequently, Cavendish could be both sexes and none, constructing natural philosophy and generating imaginary worlds. We are left with the question of whether Cavendish thought that gender and even sex are social and cultural constructs, thus anticipating the modern examination of these categories.

Chapter 1 considers the material and discursive factors which defined the representation of hunger and appetite in the Renaissance theatre. It explores the lived experience of hunger and appetite in early modern England, situating these issues in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It engages with early modern dietaries, religious texts and popular cultural forms such as ballads in order to define the precise nature of early modern attitudes to hunger and appetite. The chapter concludes by considering the practical and theoretical implications of staging hunger and appetite on the Renaissance stage. It focusses on the theatres as places devoted to the sale of both plays and food, and considers the complex and multifaceted relationships of the period’s various audiences with the lived experience of hunger and appetite.

This chapter explores how medical knowledge shaped Shakespeare’s figuration of the passions. According to ancient writers, emotions originate in the organic soul, moving continually among the body, mind, and psyche. The passions are thus psychic in their inception and interstitial in their operations, both within the individual subject and in their transactions between people. Early modern emotions also shuttle between human beings and the meteorological world around them, as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest exemplify. I supplement the precedence granted to Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory in recent scholarship by charting how other ancient medical and natural philosophical sources informed early modern constructions of emotion. Emergent theories in medicine and natural philosophy (Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsian homeopathy) augmented existing understandings of the passions, as did vernacular medical treatises and popular medical controversies. While Shakespeare did not adhere in any systematic way to particular medical paradigms, their concepts and idioms influenced his eclectic representation of the passions. His plays depict the fundamentally interactive and dynamic nature of the emotions, the psychic intricacy of their physiological, mental, and imaginative functions, and the intensity of their intersubjective transmissions.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

This chapter addresses the tension between care for the body and care for the Christian soul within medieval medicine. In particular, it argues that medieval patients often devalued the skill and knowledge of physicians, since physicians were perceived to be overly concerned with the study of medicine rather than its praxis. Moreover, the relative inability of the medieval medical practitioner to combat death effectively (despite charging large fees for his service) led to the development of literary motifs mocking the incompetence of physicians. This chapter argues that Chaucer shared many medieval English prejudices against physicians as a social class, as well as the perception that human beings had only limited recourse against the dictates of mortality. It also provides a survey of many of Chaucer’s invocations of medical theory, and contextualises Chaucer’s attitudes to medicine and medical practice within a larger literary and historical context.