A Genre Analysis of Discourses Surrounding Venereal Disease in Seventeenth-Century England
Tony McEnery & Helen Baker
CASS, Lancaster University
Sufferers of venereal disease in seventeenth-century England faced an array of difficulties. Not only must they cope with the painful and often worsening symptoms of syphilis, gonorrhea or whichever type of sexually transmitted illness they had contracted, they were also obliged to hide these symptoms to avoid being marked and condemned as a carrier of such a disease. This talk is about perceptions of the disease and the types of texts which referred to it.
Using the term pox as a starting point, we gather together a selection of suitable search queries - terms of interest which were used to refer to venereal disease in early modern England - and describe how this list was compiled step-by-step. We demonstrate the challenges inherent in achieving a comprehensive list of names due to the necessary inclusion of many near-synonyms and spelling variants of each term. A large proportion of these terms were constructed by the insertion of a nationality adjective in front of the noun pox or disease, e.g. Italian pox, American disease, with French pox being the most commonly used alternative to the pox. Accordingly we investigate to what extent English writers associated venereal disease with different nations.
Following on from that, in order to uncover the kinds of written works in which references to venereal disease appear, we undertake a genre analysis. Such a genre-based approach has only recently become possible due to the addition of a categorisation genre framework for titles within the EEBO corpus. The talk will present the findings of that analysis and reflect on the possible reasons for the changing pattern of reference to venereal disease by genre over the century.
References
Siena, K.P. (2001), The "Foul Disease" and Privacy: The Effects of Venereal Disease and Patient Demand on the Medical Marketplace in Early Modern London. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 75, 2: 199-224.
Szreter, S. (2017), Treatment rates for the pox in early modern England: a comparative estimate of the prevalence of syphilis in the city of Chester and its rural vicinity in the 1770s. Continuity and Change, 32, 2: 183-223.