ABSTRACT:
Contents
Introduction: "Mountebanks, monsters and several beasts, Margaret Cavendish at the Antwerp Carnival Fair"
Part I: Performing medieval quacks (1: Quack actresses of 1514; 2: Literary mountebanks I: Sex 'n shopping on the medieval religious stage; 3: A quack picture: a key to the appearance of medieval staging?)
Part II: Visual aspects of mountebank activity (4: Friendship albums and other visual sources; 5: Containers, stages and venues; 6: The troupe; 7: Performative aspects)
Part III: Marketing medicine (8: Medical and commercial activity; 9: Women as healers; 10: Literary mountebanks II: stage quacks of Ben Jonson, Thomas Killigrew, Aphra Behn and Christian Weise; 11: Quack couples: the male-female partnership)
Part IV: Gendering tooth-drawers (12: Tooth-drawers; 13: Literary mountebanks III: Johann Kuhnaus' female tooth-drawer, 1700; 14: A French tooth-drawer: on the stage of Europe's first secular theatre?)
Part V: Commedia dell'arte actresses (15: The inamorata; 16: Comici and buffoni; 17: Italian mixed-gender troupes: Thomas II Platter and Hippolytus Guarinonius; 18: Female stage costume and cross-dressing)
Part VI: English comedians in Shakespearean Europe: the women (19: English actresses and the rise of the German professional stage; 20: Pre-1650 women associated with the English comedians; 21: The introduction of actresses in German-speaking Europe; 22: Literary mountebanks IV: Johann Beer's flying quacks and mixed-gender "English" troupe)
Bibliography, Index, 60 plates.
SEL (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900), 48, 2008 (Peter G Platt): Another of the year’s best and most enjoyable books also considers the staging of women: M. A. Katritzky’s Women, Medicine, and Theatre, 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks. A treasure chest of astonishing verbal and visual information, the book uses the “investigative fields of early modern comparative literature, the history of medicine, and theatre history” (p. 1). I would buy the book for its nearly sixty plates alone: these images open up the little-known world of early modern staged mountebanks and quacks. Katritzky builds to an examination of the intersection between “itinerant performing and healing women” and the way in which “the specific issue of early modern European women on the professional stage as a whole . . . is profoundly linked with, and usefully considered in conjunction with, the performative marketing of medicine and cosmetics” (p. 1). The second half of the book will force a critical revision of the role of women in theater history—history that has, somewhat understandably, focused on absence rather than presence, passivity rather than activity.
The first part of the book is less gender specific and, with an impressive use of textual and visual documents, Katritzky provides a thick description of performative quackery. Katritzky hints tantalizingly at the connection between the discourse of “performing quacks” on the one hand and that of monsters and prodigies on the other. All are, ultimately, connected to the theatrical. This section of the book also can act as an extended gloss on Volpone’s treatment of Scoto of Mantua, and Katritzky’s observation that “mountebanks . . . hermaphrodites, dwarfs, and giants often formed the nucleus of a family business” makes Volpone’s strange and wonderful “family” part of a hitherto ignored aspect of theatrical culture (p. 110). She does not make this connection, and her reading of the play is overly brief—the book’s only disappointing part. On the whole, however, Katritzky has, like an archaeologist, unearthed a lost world that better helps us understand the worlds—before and after it—that we thought we knew and that now, thanks to her prodigious scholarship, seem different.
