Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks

摘要

Through vivid examples and the analysis of an impressive iconographic apparatus (including over fifty images), she reconstructs the visual impact and performance techniques employed by itinerant quacks (Part 2), taking into account their stages and costumes and the recurrent elements in their performances: from the display of real or feigned exotic animals to the exhibition of monstrous fetuses or joined twins, from spectacular demonstrations of self-wounding to the ingestion of poison or dangerous chemicals. Cosmetics was an expanding market, and this provided women in mountebank troupes with a terrain where they could deploy their gendered expertise, dispensing cosmetic advice to female customers and even beauty services "in what were in effect mobile beauty salons" (p. 166).