Research

My literary research examines the dynamic engagement, in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, between literature and works that deal with health in both body and soul.

In a print marketplace flooded with texts offering “ready and easy” ways to health, authors necessarily positioned their methods and cures as useful and authoritative; yet these methods and cures were often of a one-size-fits-all nature, and provided abstract and over-generalized solutions to problems in physical and spiritual health. The literary texts I examine engage with these discourses of health in ways that acknowledge what is left out of the broad models of regimens, and incorporate individual experience and flawed human knowledge into their explorations of health in nation, body, soul, and mind.

In these works, we see literature participating in the rapidly changing (and deeply fraught) landscape of health and medicine, and such active participation in societal concerns helps demonstrate the enduring values and uses of literature and the humanities beyond the classroom.