Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage Reprint Edition
Author(s): Mary Floyd-Wilson (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2015
Edition: Reprint
Language: English
Print length: 250 pages
ISBN-10: 1107559375
ISBN-13: 9781107559370
Book Description
In this ground-breaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson argues that the early modern English believed their affections and behavior were influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies that coursed through the natural world. These forces not only produced emotional relationships but they were also levers by which ordinary people supposed they could manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. Indeed, it was the invisibility of nature's secrets―or occult qualities―that led to a privileging of experimentation, helping to displace a reliance on ancient theories. Floyd-Wilson demonstrates how Renaissance drama participates in natural philosophy's production of epistemological boundaries by staging stories that assess the knowledge-making authority of women healers and experimenters. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi, Floyd-Wilson suggests that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"… [a] rich, well-researched volume … This valuable book illuminates underexplored aspects of early modern thought, with important consequences for understanding the period's plays. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." T. Pollard, Choice
"… [it] sheds new light on the development of science from early modern to modern … The sheer breadth of knowledge in this book will make it an appealing read for students of Shakespearian performance, gender studies, the history of science, and the history of the book." Benjamin C. Miele, The Shakespeare Newsletter
"[Floyd-Wilson's] clarity and simplicity of style and wealth of documentation increase her reader's pleasure. This book reminds us that the original, though now rare, meaning of occult is "secret or hidden". [The book] focuses on an area between God's Providence and the Devil's interference, where an animate, mysterious natural world challenged early modern men and women to discover its occult secrets." Barbara H. Traister, Renaissance Quarterly
Book Description
Mary Floyd-Wilson's groundbreaking study explores occult beliefs and their relation to women and scientific knowledge in six early modern plays.
About the Author
Mary Floyd-Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A recipient of a National Humanities Center Fellowship, she is the author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2006) and the co-editor of Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotions (with Gail Kern Paster and Katherine Rowe, 2004) and Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern England (with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, 2007). She has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Early Modern Literary Studies and Shakespeare Studies, and has co-edited a special issue of Renaissance Drama.
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