Itch, Clap, Pox

Abstract

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.

Exile and Linguistic Encounter: Early Modern English Convents in the Low Countries and France

“…This was due to the observance of enclosure when external tutors were used, and supported by the fact that speech and sociability were fundamentally embedded in language pedagogy more broadly during this period, as John Gallagher has aptly shown. 119 Oral instruction was indicated in the religious hearing the Latin lessons of the nuns in the Gravelines Poor Clares convent, and it is also detectable in the Brussels Benedictine nuns' writing, as they developed creative forms of Franglais in their letters to the archbishop and his deputies. For example, when Mary Persons translated a letter for Elizabeth Southcott on 24 April 1629, she created the word inexpecté for unexpected.…”