The Pocky Body: Part I

Abstract

As Petronius, one of the protagonists in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s colloquy, indicates, a new world-wide epidemic sufficiently horrifying to be termed ‘a plague’ was, by the 1520s, giving rise to urgent demands for public health measures to control it. Erasmus — arguably the most widely read humanist writer of the Renaissance — was horrified and alarmed by the disease and appears to have spearheaded a health-education campaign against it. The concerns and motifs of his dramatic dialogues about ‘the Spanish pox’ inform literary productions from the early modern period to the twentieth century. Until the advent of a new sexually transmitted ‘plague’ in recent years (AIDS), syphilis was the disease that had ‘caused the most … ink to flow’:2 it had a greater affinity with aesthetic creations, and in particular with the dramatic, musical and visual arts of the Renaissance, than had bubonic plague. The next two chapters will attempt to understand why the new sickness led artists and writers as diverse as Dürer, Holbein, Bronzino, Rabelais, Jonson, Dekker, Webster and Shakespeare (to name but a few) to represent images of the syphilitic within the context of their art whilst, paradoxically, the majority of English physicians shunned even to write about, let alone treat, its victims.3 KeywordsSixteenth CenturyMale VictimEarly Modern PeriodCongenital SyphilisEnglish PhysicianThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.