How did early modern people imagine their bodies? What impact did the new disease syphilis and recurrent outbreaks of plague have on these mental landscapes? Wh

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal m

Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric traged

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative repr

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific hist