The French Disease in Renaissance Italy: Representation and Experience

This Element provides a fresh approach to the representation and experience of the French Disease, by reassessing a wide range of textual and visual sources through the lens of contemporary medical ideas. It analyses how knowledge about the Great Pox was transmitted to a literate and also a wider public through performance and the circulation of popular prints. Chronicles, satirical and moralistic poems and plays about prostitutes, along with autobiographical accounts, described symptoms an...