Lesel Dawson examines figures afflicted with erotic melancholy in early modern literature and provides a historical context for their malady. She discusses how

In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with ph

In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of "distractio

This groundbreaking study of girlhood and cognition argues that early moderns depicted female puberty as a transformative event that activated girls' brains in

This book explores early modern ideas of chastity and their cultural, political, medical, moral and theological applications, demonstrating how early Stuart thi