Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/elh.2002.0009
ISSN1080-6547
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoEver since Freud linked vexation narratives with "the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment," comparisons between the demonically possessed and hysterics have been legion. But the use of "hysteria" as a scientific explanation for possession is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. 1 As the Mary Glover Case of 1602 reveals, the transformation of a bewitched demoniac into an hysteric first occurred during the era of the witchcraft trials, and even contributed to the decline of witchcraft prosecutions. 2 A trial involving many of the leading religious and political authorities in Renaissance England, the case of an allegedly bewitched young girl named Mary Glover sparked intense debate over the boundaries between [End Page 21] the natural and the supernatural and resulted in the first etiology of hysteria written in English: Edward Jorden's Briefe Discourse of A Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603). Constructed as a rational alternative to the occult, Jorden's etiology maintained that hysterica passio, or, as it was more popularly known, the "Mother," was a natural disease that could mimic the signs of demonic vexation. The satanic force animating both the bewitched and witches alike could thereafter be relocated within the female body, especially within her sexual and reproductive functions. 3
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