This master thesis aims to show how a qualitative approach to early modern medical practitioners’ perspectives can provide a basis for a better understanding of the disease of dysentery. The focus is on: 1) How the disease of dysentery was described and how the challenge of dysentery was perceived. 2) What individual measure and commitments were taken for the patients and why. 3) How the cause of the disease was understood and explained. 4) How perspectives differed between physicians and surgeons.Of particular interest when it comes to the disease of dysentery is how the disease and its cause were perceived.Eleven texts written by mainly British medical practitioners from primary sources such as reports, logbooks and letters on dysentery written during the years 1740 - 1800 have been used for close readings and a qualitative analysis was performed on the collected data.The analysis showed (i) that medical practitioners expressed considerable interest in dysentery and in trying to understand it as a great suffering for individuals, for society and for humanity as a whole. (ii) Medical practitioners took treatment measures based on how they understood the cause of the disease outbreak. Either the dysentery was referred to internal causes, as sickness in organs, especially the organs that produced bodily fluids, or it was referred to external causes, as a sickness caused by heat, cold, weather, winds, air, climate, seasons, lunar position, etc. (iii) The cause of the disease was understood and explained both as an infection and as a pre-disposition for imbalances in body fluids. (iv) Both physicians and surgeons understood that the disease of dysentery was a global phenomenon and that the disease often was connected to the climate and weather. This standpoint was based on the fact that dysentery distinguished itself as an autumnal disease. Its eruption usually began with a few scattered cases in July, then increased in August and culminated in September. Theories about the disease, its causes and treatment did not differ significantly between physicians and surgeons. However, the views of different physicians did differ.The thematic map of understanding related to disease of dysentery, shows that medical practitioners’ knowledge, theories and ideas behind the medical practice of dysentery, have an ambiguity in the view of both the dysentery and the treatment of it. This was probably due to interpretation based both on observable causes of diseases, and on a more theoretical abstract meaning, where diseases to a greater extent was understood on the basis of symptoms and signs.It is suggested that regardless of the knowledge base of the individual medical practitioner, no one represented an independent knowledge base for their treatment of dysentery; rather they participated actively with each other in a mutually constitutive way in order to shape their understanding of the dysentery. This theses’ qualitative approach, allows dysentery patients and their medical practitioners via the texts of the medical practitioners, to offer very personal accounts of a highly contagious disease.

This project traces shifts in understandings of causation from the premodern to the early modern period, focusing on one premodern interpretation of causation as representative of the Neoplatonic period, that of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and comparing this perspective to several early modern thinkers, especially, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Francis Bacon. For Dionysius, formal and final causation have metaphysical superiority over efficient and material causation. By contrast, beginning in the early modern period, efficient causation, the sense that describes how an object acquires a particular shape, begins to be seen as metaphysically supreme. The main historical and philosophical reasons for this shift in perceived supremacy are the affirmation of the primary-secondary quality distinction, and the rejection of Forms and teleology. The primary-secondary quality distinction allows for reality to be completely quantified, and thereby renders superfluous qualitative approaches to reality, such as formal causation. Similarly, the rejection of Forms and teleology leaves formal causation meaningless. After this historical overview, the philosophical hypothesis that Dionysius's premodern understanding of causation is more amenable to those who want to avoid nihilism is defended: purely scientific notions of causation have no means for providing whatness, intelligibility, or determinacy to the world in a rationally defensible manner, and thus, when pressed, a purely scientific view of the world is without whatness, intelligibility, and determinacy, which, by definition, leads to nihilism. By contrast, a world with causes other than solely scientific causes, specifically, a world with formal (and final) causation such as Dionysius's, allows for whatness, intelligibility, and determinacy, and thereby escapes nihilism because whatness requires Form, intelligibility requires Form and teleology, and determinacy requires teleology (which, in turn, is a supplement to Form). As argued, science studies the world of becoming, and therefore cannot provide the grounds for the world of being (which belongs to metaphysics); to live in a world of pure becoming without being is to have a nihilistic worldview. The epilogue draws a significant implication from this conclusion: the premodern approach invites a necessary revival of natural philosophy because the world of becoming is wider than modern science acknowledges.

Witchcraft beliefs were a vital element of the social, religious, and political landscapes of England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. English society, buffeted by ongoing processes of social, economic, and religious change, was increasingly polarized along material, ideological, and intellectual lines, exacerbated by rising poverty and inequality, political factionalism, religious dissension, and the emergence of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning. The embeddedness of witchcraft and demonism in early modern English cosmologies and quotidian social relations meant that religious and existential anxieties, interpersonal disputes, and threats to local order, settled by customary self-regulatory methods at the local level or prosecuted in court, were often encompassed within the familiar language and popular discourses of witchcraft, social order, and difference. Using trial pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and intellectual texts, this thesis examines the imbrications of these discourses and their collectively- determined meanings within the increasingly rationalized legal contexts and widening world of Augustan England, demonstrating the often deeply encoded ways in which early modern English men and women made sense of their own experiences and constituted and re-constituted their identities and affinities. Disorderly by nature, an inversion of natural, religious, and social norms, witchcraft in the Christian intellectual tradition simultaneously threatened and preserved order. Just as light could not exist without dark, or good without evil, there could be no fixed state of order: its existence was determined, in part, by its antithesis. Such diacritical oppositions extended beyond the metaphysical and are legible in contemporary notions of social difference, including attitudes about the common and poorer sorts of people, patriarchal gender and sexual roles, and nascent racial ideologies. These attitudes, roles, and ideologies drew sharp distinctions between normative and transgressive appearances, behaviours, and beliefs. This thesis argues that they provided a blueprint for the discursive construction of identity categories, defined in part by alterity, and that intelligible in witchcraft discourses are these fears of and reactions to disruptive and disorderly difference, otherness, and deviance—reactions which could themselves become deeply disruptive. In exploring the intersections of poverty, gender, sexuality, and race within collective understandings of witchcraft in Augustan England, this thesis aims to contribute to our understandings of the complex and dynamic ways in which English men and women perceived themselves, their communities, and the world around them.

Bernardino de Ávila Girón was a Spanish merchant and notary who lived in Japan between 1594 and 1619. He traveled from Spain to Manila around 1583, took up residence in Nagasaki and was living there when six missionaries and twenty Japanese were crucified on February 5, 1597. He witnessed the persecution of Christians after the edict of expulsion of European missionaries on February 14, 1614. Based on these experiences and his observation of Japanese customs, he wrote the Relación del reyno del Nippon al que llaman corruptamente Jappon, the only secular account written in Spanish about Japan and the failed expansion of Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ties linking seventeenth-century Spain and the Americas in literature have been widely explored. Literary critics have studied the relationship between Spain and Asia in the context of medieval travel writing and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism. The relations between the Spanish empire and the empires of Asia, however, have been studied mostly by historians. My dissertation examines Bernardino de Ávila’s work not as a historical account, but as a narrative composed by a layman who would not have been considered in the seventeenth century either a historian or a reliable chronicler of martyrdoms. However, he provides a valuable and memorable eyewitness account that defies categorization. I use published sources and archival documentation to establish a more complete biography of Bernardino de Ávila, study the textual transmission of the Relación, a work that exists in multiple copies, place the Relación and Bernardino de Ávila’s life in historical context, and focus on its relation to other historical and literary writing of the period, including writing on the Japanese martyrs by the Jesuit Pedro Morejón and the playwright Lope de Vega, who were writing for very different readerships. I define the genre of the Relación and examine ideas of authority in the writing of history and hagiography and conclude by tracing the history of this work from the seventeenth century to our own day, and offer an explanation of why it has been excluded from the literary and historical canon.

In the thesis I inquire into the nature of the same-sex bonds in Shakespeare’s comedies. I discuss seven pairs of characters and demonstrate how in his comedies, Shakespeare first created homosocial relationships, later homoerotic relationships, then bisexual relationships, and, finally, a couple that may be described as androgynous. I demonstrate that in the early comedies the relationships are primarily homosocial and serve the purpose of self-realization. The self-realization includes reaching of a balance between a “feminine,” and a “masculine” self, with the goal of becoming a mature, androgynous human being. Although there are some homoerotic undercurrents in both the male and female relationships created during this period, I do not believe that these relationships are intended to represent a permanent sexual orientation. I see them as a part of the pattern that occurs in most of the plays, which possibly reflects Shakespeare’s concept of the process of maturing into an adult who is ready to accept the bonds of marriage. All of Shakespeare’s comedies contain homosocial relationships, sometimes with homoerotic undercurrents. The primary purpose of these relationships is the realization of the self. A young person enters into a relationship with another young person, a coeval, who resembles him/herself in numerous ways. They spend a lot of time together, involved in activities that are of interest to both of them. They see themselves in their friend. They identify not only with the persona, but also with the physique of the friend. Therefore, the (homo)erotic undercurrents that are present in some of the relationships are in fact the realization of the characters’ own eroticism and sexuality and are therefore not directed at the other character with the aim of gratification of sexual desire. The relationships with (homo)erotic undercurrents are merely a stage in the development of the self, and do not constitute a permanent sexual orientation. The final stage in the above pattern is marriage. Once the character has realized him/herself, (s)he is ready to marry. The homoerotic undercurrents begin to emerge in 1598, and in 1599 Shakespeare creates Antonio and Sebastian as his first homoerotic couple. In the same play appear the first three bisexual characters: Olivia, Orsino, and Sebastian. Again, since the three characters reach self-realization and marry at the play’s end, the issue of bisexuality can be interpreted either as a lifestyle, or as a stepping stone in one’s development toward adulthood and marriage. Another possibility is that the occurrence of bisexuality and the androgynous twins Viola and Sebastian serve to open up space for an inward marriage. In other words, the twins represent the climax of the pattern of self-realization through friends and lover, and add the notion that the better we know ourselves, the more we are aware of our androgyny. In the pattern that I trace through the four comedies, I demonstrate how Shakespeare uses homosocial, homoerotic, and bisexual relationships as means of learning about the true self, the self which reaches beyond the boundaries of gender, into—androgyny.

A complete study of the principle would take into consideration other literary types besides the drama, but since, historically, the drama takes precedence over those other types, and since the first important controversy on the subject arose in England in connection with tragedy, I have considered it best to limit the material undertaken here to that form of dramatic art. Further than that, the study will be limited to some of the leading tragedies of the Elizabethian age, excluding those of Shakespeare, for it was the use or misuse of poetic justice in these plays which formed the basis of the famous Dennis-Addison controversy in the early eighteenth century. Poetic justice had become a highly formalized idea by that time, and Addison became a defender of the liberties of the dramatist and insisted that the reputation of English writers of tragedy should not be injured by the enforcement of such an arbitrary rule as Den is and his fellow critic proposed. Since that time, the field over which the battle of the theory might be waged has decreased in size. Shakespeare is no longer condemned for having brought Desdemona to an unhappy death. The moder, especially, has turned from the old accepted idea of “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall also be reap”, and has taken a particular pleasure in turning it upside down. How we see that there is no planned plot for our lives. The narrow sense of tragedy that once held us when we saw justice overtake him who deserved his fate has given way before another sense of tragedy, one which apprehends that perhaps the greatest tragedy may be founded upon the very inscrutability of our lives. We no longer believe in the old dogma of poetic justice. Even so, poetic justice, whether it be modern or ancient, always has the fundamental problem of art with which to contend. That problem is, rightly enough, should it be the purpose of art to please, or to instruct? Dependent upon the answer to this question, is another problem: should the principle of poetic justice be accepted or rejected? Only this much may be said: it seems reasonable to expect that the absolute conformity to a strict form of poetic justice would injure the best interests of art and aesthetics as badly as the absolute violation of the doctrine would affect the conception of morality. A compromise seems inevitable.

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