Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks

Drawing on a comprehensive range of early modern British, German and other European images and texts, this study offers the first interdisciplinary gendered assessment of early modern performing itinerant quacks. The contribution of women is taken as the focus for an investigation of the nature of the links between the theatrical and the medical, in the activities of quack troupes as they went about curing, selling and, above all, performing.