The French Disease in Renaissance Italy
Representation and Experience

This Element mentions through word and image of how the Great Pox was represented, imagined, and experienced in Renaissance Italy.

John Henderson (Author)

9781009507530, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

100 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.8 cm, 0.284 kg

This Element provides a fresh approach to the representation and experience of the French Disease, by reassessing a wide range of textual and visual sources through the lens of contemporary medical ideas. It analyses how knowledge about the Great Pox was transmitted to a literate and also a wider public through performance and the circulation of popular prints. Chronicles, satirical and moralistic poems and plays about prostitutes, along with autobiographical accounts, described symptoms and the experience of patients, reflecting how non-medical men and women understood the nature of this terrible new disease and its profound physical and psychological impact. The second major theme is how the French Disease was represented visually. Woodcuts and broadsheets showing the moral and physical decline of courtesans are analysed together with graphic medical illustrations of symptoms and their treatment together with images of the diseased body of St Job, patron saint of the French Disease.

Introduction
1. Pox and chronicles
2. Pox and medicine: theory and practice
3. Pox and patients
4. Pox and prostitution
5. Pox, religion and St Job
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]