Seminario impartido por Margaret Boyle (Bowdoin College, Maine)

Fecha: Miércoles, 4 de marzo a las 16 horas

Lugar: Salón de actos del palacio Cerveró. Instituto Interuniversitario López Piñero.

Retransmisión on line:

https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/219b48cf24514ac0a3ea46156dc29fa0

Both the spaces for and topics of health and healing in early modern Spain were inextricably linked to public theater, not only through their moral-financial tie but also by virtue of the ongoing dramatization of health practices as a trope or plot device. This essay explores a number of Tirso de Molina’s plays as a way to explore the complex intersections between gender and health in the comedia. As an example, consider early in the first act of El amor médico when a provocative question is raised to the play’s heroine: “Por qué ha de estudiar / medicina una mujer?”. Here the protagonist’s aspirations and practice of medicine within the world of the play provide insight into commonly held attitudes about women and medicine, both real and imagined. This essay will stress the importance of this question, the numerous and sometimes contradictory replies offered within this seventeenth-century play-text, the significance of the woman doctor—as both theatrical fiction and reality—as it relates to the professionalization of medicine across Spain from the late fifteenth century forward, and its impact on the topic of women’s health management as well as women’s work as healers, broadly defined. Sustained focus on the gendered dimension of these staged relationships better allows for commentary on narrative’s ability to participate in the construction of treatment plans as well as the impact of medical practices on health outcomes within these staged imaginations.

Biografía

Margaret Boyle is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College (Maine). She is the author of Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence and Punishment in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. For 2019-2020, Professor Boyle has been awarded the Howard Foundation Fellowship for literary studies and will be in residence in Spain starting this January at the López Piñero Institute for the History of Science and Medicine as a Fulbright Senior U.S. Scholar. She has recently published articles in the academic journals Postmedieval, Comedia Performance, Hispanic Issues and Gender and History.