Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic - Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Paperback, New ed)

Jonathan Gil Harris examines the origins of modern discourses of social pathology in Elizabethan and Jacobean medical and political writing. Plays, pamphlets and political treatises of this period display an increasingly xenophobic tendency to attribute England's ills to 'foreign bodies' such as Jews, Catholics and witches, as well as treat their allegedly 'poisonous' features for the health of the body politic. Harris argues that this tendency resonates with two of the distinctive paradigms of Paracelsus' pharmacy which also includes the notion that poison has a medicinal power. The emergence of these paradigms in early modern English political thought signals a decisive shift from Galenic humoral tradition towards twentieth-century politico-medical discourses of 'infection' and 'containment', which, like their early modern predecessors, make mysterious the domestic origins of social conflict and the operations of political authority.

General

Imprint:	Cambridge UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Release date:	December 2006
First published:	1998
Authors:	Jonathan Gil Harris
Dimensions:	228 x 151 x 12mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	216
Edition:	New ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-521-03468-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Promotions
LSN:	0-521-03468-X
Barcode:	9780521034685

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