The French Disease in Renaissance Italy

Summary

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 and the experience of patients, reflecting how non-medical men and women understood the nature of this terrible new disease and its profound physical and psychological impact. The second major theme is how the French Disease was represented visually. Woodcuts and broadsheets showing the moral and physical decline of courtesans are analysed together with graphic medical illustrations of symptoms and their treatment together with images of the diseased body of St Job, patron saint of the French Disease.