This book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer than may be imagined, the author explores the social and religious frameworks by which illness was more commonly recorded and understood. The story that emerges is of illness written into personal manuscripts in prescriptive rather than original terms. This study uncovers the ways in which illness, so described, contributed to the self-patterning these texts were set up to perform.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. Misery to Mirth seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580-1720. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the fragile body after illness. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. The third perspective concerns the patient's loved ones; it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. Through these discussions, the volume shines a light on some of the most profound, as well as the more prosaic, aspects of early modern existence, from attitudes to life and death, to details of what convalescents ate for supper and wore in bed.

This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women’s life writing in a specifically Irish context. By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women’s narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.

Examines the performative aspects of prayer and how they were represented in literature in early modern England.

This book examines apian imagery—bees, drones, honey, and the hive—in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society faced unprecedented challenges even as it came to emblematize the process of colonization itself. The beehive connected the labor of those marginalized by race, class, gender, or species to larger considerations of sovereignty. This study examines the works of William Shakespeare; Francis Daniel Pastorius; Hopi, Wyandotte, and Pocasset cultures; John Milton; Hester Pulter; and Bernard Mandeville. Its contribution lies in its exploration of the simultaneously recuperative and destructive narratives that place the bee at the nexus of the human, the animal, and the environment. The book argues that bees play a central representational and physical role in shaping conflicts over hierarchies of the early transatlantic world.

“This book summons an almost visceral response in its brilliant counterpoint to the customary understanding and celebration of Advent and Christmas. In the arena of wounds and griefs, though each experience is unique, we are joined in our humanness, finding common ground. The word sympathy means being together in profound distress. Art makes such anguish visible. Commentary penetrates and elucidates. These meditations and images are a marvelous gift.” —Luci Shaw, Writer in Residence, Regent College, author and poet Christmas can be a time of joy but also of tears, memory and prayer. Celebration does not always come easily. In twenty-five illustrated daily readings we commune with Scripture and the wounded artists that gave the world masterpieces of hope: Gauguin, Tissot, Caravaggio, Tanner, Delacroix, van Gogh, Dürer. We’ve heard the names. We recognize the paintings. But do we know the artists? They were flawed and often troubled people: a widower that saw a vision of Christ; a murderer who painted himself as Peter; a grieving father that drew his sons as Jesus and John; an orphan who saw his salvation in the Holy Family. Despite their wounds—perhaps because of them—these artists achieved the sublime. Their humanity inspires us. Based on the latest research in history and grief, Wounded in Spirit returns us to where Christian art began. From mourning in Roman catacombs to works of the masters, we join the world’s great religious artists on their pilgrimages of hope and brokenness. In their wounds, in our wounds, we may once again encounter “God with us.”