This special session engages the study of medical history and the medical humanities by raising questions about discourses of medicine and the nature of the pathological body in early modern England. Our panelists push beyond matters of medical diagnosis and treatment to illustrate the embeddedness of early modern medicine in literary, cultural, and material concerns. They also join recent efforts moving beyond the seminal work of Gail Kern Paster and Mary Floyd-Wilson, among others, to consider relations between early modern medicine, religious debates, print history, and literary representation.

Each of the contributions to the session identifies new modes of correspondence between pathological and pathologized bodies and the discursive networks that construct and make sense of such illnesses. For example, Kaara Peterson studies the motif of pearls in paintings of Queen Elizabeth I in relation to pathologies of virginity. Elizabeth Harvey considers how John Donne’s near-fatal illness with typhus or relapsing fever reconfigured relations between the body and the soul. And Jennifer Rust asks how a popular genre of printed broadsides related to the plague raise new questions of political theology in seventeenth-century England. Each essay approaches a different genre of representation (painting, poetry, prose, broadside) in ways that expand traditional archives of medical history and draw attention to the significance of form.

Kaara Peterson takes up Frances Yates’s suggestion that the pearl as a symbol of Queen Elizabeth should be “fully worked out.” As Shakespeare’s allusion to “pearls’” derivation “in foul oysters” readily reveals, Elizabethans had moved beyond Pliny’s imaginative fables to be well apprised of the science explaining the gem’s material origins, but the relevance of this natural history of pearls for Elizabeth’s portraits remains obscure. Pearls had distinct medicinal properties, with special therapeutic qualities. Many scholars have identified the special nature of pearls in portraits of Elizabeth but have not investigated the medical and scientific properties of pearls. In short, Elizabeth does not simply wear pearls; she is one. Peterson’s essay expands on the medical and scientific discourses of virginity as linked to natural material objects and their representation in Elizabethan portraiture.

Elizabeth Harvey examines souls and medical remedies in John Donne’s account of his near-fatal illness in Devotions on Emergent Occasions (1624). Although he distinguished “bodily” medicine from a “ghostly” physick that is dispensed by God and is concerned with spiritual health, Donne never subsumes the material, bodily nature of his crisis into a theologically predictable register of Christian understanding. Rather, he set the spiritual and physiological in resistant, fractious dialogue with one another, continually insisting on the enabling capacities of his body and his organic soul, whose faculties are paradoxically rendered increasingly apparent by the erosions of illness. His meditation on the “soul bell” functions as a compressed De anima that anatomizes his own organic soul, the vegetative and sensible faculties that even when afflicted by sickness, possess the sensory capacity to know and record his experience of illness. The remedies his physicians administer are derived from the concentrated properties of animal bodies (vipers and pigeons). Donne’s incorporation of these substances accentuates the faculties of his own vegetable and sensible souls, putting Devotions into conversation with the often violent incorporation of bodies and souls in his satiric epic, Metempsychosis (1601).

Jennifer Rust examines a genre of seventeenth-century print culture known as the “Lord Have Mercies” that regularly appeared amidst serious plague outbreaks (including in 1625, 1636 and 1665). These cheap broadsides appropriated the official mortality data produced by the city of London and reframed it in both medical and religious terms. On one hand, they popularized new numerical ways of knowing the illness and health of the body politic that anticipate the modern sciences of demography and epidemiology. On the other hand, these broadsides promulgate a numeracy deeply invested in the revelation of a providential cosmos and an etiology of disease dependent on supernatural forces. These plague broadsides reveal a dimension of political theology within early modern understandings of medicine and disease on several levels. On the population level, the broadsides are artifacts of the larger mobilization of civic and ecclesiastical infrastructures that occurred during during plague emergencies. On the individual level, they make visible the ways in which spiritual and physical health were intertwined as early modern people sought to manage their daily lives within urban spaces afflicted by widespread disease.