In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical etiologies and cures. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and greensickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness.
With reference to the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature investigates how early modern representations of lovesickness expose contemporary cultural constructions of love, revealing the relation of sexuality to spirituality and the creation and shattering of the impassioned subject. It offers an important contribution to the history of romantic love and will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, gender, and medical history.

Explores the representation of revenge from Classical to early modern literature This collection explores a range of literary and historical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Iceland and medieval and early modern England to provide an understanding of wider historical continuities and discontinuities in representations of gender and revenge. It brings together approaches from literary criticism, gender theory, feminism, drama, philosophy and ethics to allow greater discussion between these subjects and across historical periods and to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of the ways in which ideas about gender and revenge interrelate. Key features: The coverage, from classical through to renaissance literature, gives a sense of how the revenge motifs work over time with gender in mind It will appeal to a wide readership including those working in classics; medieval and renaissance literature; gender studies; revenge and revenge tragedy; the intertextual relations between ancient, medieval and early modern texts It considers what constitutes the literary revenge tragedy tradition, suggesting points of continuity and difference as well as rethinking the parameters of the genre Contributors include Edith Hall, Alison Findlay and Janet Clare

Revenge and Gender from Classical to Renaissance Literature' looks at a range of literary and historical texts to provide an understanding of wider historical continuities and discontinuities in representations of revenge and thereby establishing some of the key paradigms for the way that the relationship between revenge and gender has been configured.The collection brings together approaches from literary criticism, gender theory, feminism, drama, philosophy, and ethics to allow greater discussion between these subjects and across historical periods and to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of the ways in which ideas about gender and revenge interrelate. It demonstrates that revenge acts frequently cross-question the very cultural and literary tropes they seem to reinforce since they disrupt as well as affirm conventional cultural constructions about how gender roles shape displays of passion and ideas of agency.