The intersection between medical knowledge and pathological discourse concerning women is an issue that holds resonance with early modern texts, both visual and dramatic. The manner in which these texts portray the female body emphasize the private aspects of reproductive issues, moving the matter of women's health from a personal to a collective concern. Through a variety of media, women are thus discussed as both objects and agents of this concern, wrapped up in a growing anxiety to understand the relationship between women and medicine.
During the early modern period, the era in which I will be situating these concerns, male anxiety about a number of changing social issues is expressed through both drama and the visual arts; these often draw upon or are influenced by the medical and instructional texts of the period, where the interior, secretive, and thus “unknowable” aspects of the female body are highlighted and intensified within the exclusively female realms that pertain to reproduction and pregnancy.
In current scholarship, the point of conversion between medicine and the female body alternately arrives at one of two places: the ways that the female body has been pathologized or the role the midwife has played in the increasingly masculine realm of medical practice. My examination of these issues involves combining the two separate fields of scholarship in an effort to explore the manner in which female-to-female medical knowledge also risks becoming pathological in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and The Winter's Tale and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling. I further explore this link between female medical knowledge and pathology in the paintings of Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, and David Teniers the Younger.
I first examine Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, where the prospective dangers of Helena's medical knowledge are eventually resolved in the nature of her self-treated cure. In the next section, I move to a discussion of The Winter's Tale and an investigation of Paulina's potential for and ultimate escape from pathology. In the final section, I consider the alternate fate of Beatrice-Joanna in Thomas Middleton's The Changeling, where female sexual knowledge is discovered as deceptive and is subsequently punished. My discussion of these dramatic works is informed by primary texts, current scholarship, and an investigation of early modern visual art.