A ‘prodigious latitude’ of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2020-012133
Author(s):  
Heather Meek
Keyword(s):  
Medical Information ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Psychological Symptoms ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Formally Trained ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
Women’S Writing

In its examination of a selection of 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing, this essay considers a range of context-specific and historically specific medical vocabularies and tries to illuminate the various linguistic registers of physicians’ and women’s understandings and experiences of physio-emotional illness. In a preprofessionalised world in which medical and literary cultures overlapped significantly and medical knowledge was not yet restricted to a group of formally trained male elites, vocabularies of illness abounded, oftentimes moving freely between the permeable disciplinary boundaries of the age. Physician writers, in their efforts to define and label the cluster of related conditions commonly known as spleen, vapours, melancholy, or hypochondriacal and hysterical affliction, often operated on a principle of humility, embracing uncertainty, admitting fault and assuming a willingness to question their own assumptions. They recognised that elusive processes were at the heart of these conditions, which came with a vast amalgam of physical and psychological symptoms, as well as a long list of possible designations. For their part, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Tollet, Anna Seward and Susanna Blamire interpreted with a keen eye the medical information available to them, deployed the plethora of words at their disposal and created their own vocabularies of illness. As they formulated a productively unstable, fluctuating lexicon to conceptualise and define spleen and its analogous conditions, these women writers came up with new words and inventive metonyms, and drew at once on the language of medicine, social and domestic inequality, and the natural world to capture experiences of suffering.

Black Women Readers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary I. Unger
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Literary Societies ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Women’S Writing

Black women readers have innovated various literacies—oral, textual, visual, and digital—as a way to validate their lived experiences, bond with one another, and lobby for their personal and collective agency. During the 18th century, black women made use of both vernacular and print cultures as strategies of survival and emancipation. Throughout the 19th century, they used reading for racial uplift in institutions such as the black press, the black women’s club movement, and literary societies. Moreover, they documented these acts of reading in cultural artifacts such as scrapbooks, which gave them the ability to manipulate print culture in deeply personal and political ways. Throughout these endeavors, black women readers deployed various literacies—reading both “aright” as well as “rogue”—to assert their agency in the era of print. In the 20th century, black women’s reading became even more professionalized in the role of editor, a position that facilitated the circulation and promotion of black women’s writing; this effort became even more urgent toward the end of the century when black feminists formed consciousness-raising groups and established new academic disciplines that depended on the recovery, anthologizing, and reading of black women’s writing. At the same time, from the postwar era through the end of the century, black women readers emerged as a significant reading demographic, courted by publishers who recognized them as a profitable consumer base. Into the 21st century, black women readers have turned to online and digital spaces in which to continue the tradition of reading for liberation and unity. In this way, the act of reading has also provided for black women a way to negotiate their relationships to American culture, each other, as well as themselves.

Katherine Philips

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Wright ◽  
Jennie Challinor
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Local Community ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
Katherine Philips ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women’S Writing

Katherine Philips (b. 1632–d. 1664) is one of the most important figures in English women’s literary history. She is also a key figure within the history of 17th-century English-language poetry, irrespective of gender. Archival evidence indicates that Philips began to write while young: some of her juvenilia may have been written during her mid-teens, while the earliest items in her autograph collection of her own poems date from her late teens and early twenties. Throughout the remainder of her short life she kept writing, responding to literary fashions (such as the vogue for French neoclassical drama in the early 1660s), the downfall and restoration of the monarchy, and events within her local community and literary coteries. She formed productive acquaintances with some of the leading literary and cultural figures in contemporary London and Dublin, and was the first woman to see her work performed on the commercial stage in Britain or Ireland. Her writing shows a deep engagement with the English literary canon, and was to be an inspiration to later 17th-century and early-18th-century poets and dramatists, both male and female. After their early popularity, Philips’s writings faded from view and were little known in the later 18th and throughout the 19th centuries. (Keats, an important exception, admired her poetry and recommended it to a friend in 1817.) Her critical fortunes began to revive at the outset of the 20th century, when her poetry was re-edited and made available to a scholarly readership. Though curiously neglected in Virginia Woolf’s feminist classic, A Room of One’s Own (1929), her work has benefited greatly from the growth of scholarly interest in early modern women’s writing since the late 1980s. Her writings on female friendship have retained their popularity for feminist scholars and have also been read as key texts in the history of female literary homoeroticism. Her avid interest in politics has been discussed in relation both to literary cultures of the interregnum and Restoration and to women’s engagement with the public sphere. The survival of numerous early manuscripts of her writing a fairly detailed tracing of the production, circulation, and reception of her writing, while the issue of her involvement (or otherwise) in the publication of her 1664 Poems is still an area of lively critical disagreement. Renewed interest in the formal qualities of women’s writing, as well as attention to such issues as literary archipelagism and epistolarity, should ensure that Philips’s writing continues to speak to current critical debates and to attract high levels of scholarly attention.

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