In a wide-ranging series of essays, Kaara L. Peterson refutes Michael Foucault’s assertion that the hystericization of women’s bodies occurred in the early eighteenth century by examining various Tudor-era texts that explain female corporeality as ordinarily dissolute and subject to an animal-like womb. She further demonstrates that theater-going audiences understood the sexual messages delivered by popular playwrights when they heard characters reference “the mother,” a euphemism for uterine-induced behavior. Peterson begins with an introductory chapter that reviews the scholarly work done on hysterical disease and lays out her plan of exposition. She also provides medical context for the sixteenth-century, still dominated by Galenic theories of humoralism that categorized females as “naturally plethoric and polluted by their own blood as well as build-ups of seed” (29). Poisonous vapors from unreleased, malignant menses, especially in virgins, would deleteriously affect total health.

Peterson’s first chapter focuses particularly on King Lear and the use of “the mother” in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The term referred to the popular complaint known as hysteria or a wandering womb. She contests the assumption that Shakespeare created Lear suffering from hysteria, even though Lear employs the phrase hysterica passio to describe his anguish. Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew that medical literature impugned the womb for the strangling, suffocating symptoms of female disorder, although some scholars have suggested that the Bard erred in attributing such a disorder to Lear. Peterson argues that Shakespeare knew what he was doing, satirizing contemporary discussion on the malaise and sending a message to his audiences that the king’s mind was unhinged, not his womb.

Peterson notes that even in the midst of theoretical and jurisdictional challenges to traditional physicians, discussions among medical men remained consistent about their treatment of female patients and their distrust of female bodies. Reformers who followed the new medicine of Paracelsus, an anti-Galenist maverick, subscribed nonetheless to classical principles about uterine pathologies and referred to hysterical diseases as endemic to the female population because of all that putrefying blood. Blood figures dramatically in so-called revenge tragedies, when words scrawled in “the ink of lovers” elicit revulsion among men. Peterson explores Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and the letter written by Bel-imperia in blood as an example of female instability, her compromised state of mind caused by an irritated womb. She links Kyd’s play with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which contains another example of a distaff character, Tamora, whose womb has gone bad and led her to adultery, and with ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford, wherein Annabella writes a letter in her own blood to expunge her guilt, her womb the “organic author” of her hysterica passio (139).

Peterson also delves into another manifestation of hysterica passio, revivification, a stage stratagem common in Shakespeare’s day. Audiences believed that demonic possession, even lifelessness, could be followed by bodily revival because of a real-life case in 1602 involving a teenager named Mary Glover. Glover manifested all manner of bizarre behavior, including fits, springing from an altercation she had with an older woman, Elizabeth Jackson, accused of practicing witchcraft on her. Was Glover bewitched into unconsciousness, a fake who loved attention, or suffering from hysteria, the bane of fecund, young females? A trial determined that Jackson did bewitch Glover, who later underwent exorcism by Puritan clerics; however, many physicians continued to insist that Glover suffered from a hysterical illness, not from a hex. Given the sensationalism of the claims, playwrights, especially Thomas Middleton in The Revenger’s Tragedy, rushed to use Glover’s blackouts as dramatic devices, illustrations of overweening female desire and the curse of “the mother.” Middleton also reminded his audiences that chastity and goodness could not spare a woman from uterine woes. Lastly, Peterson sums up the shift toward women in popular culture by comparing the character of Gwendolyn in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) to the role she plays as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, acted out for friends. She concludes that this episode demonstrates “the difference between the literalized model” in early modern medicine and “its reinscriptions for Victorian sexual probity” (192).

Replete with extensive notes and bibliography, Peterson’s book does what the author sets out to achieve; it demonstrates that since the time of Hippocrates fits of hysteria were thought to be exclusively female and uterine in origin and that this assumption had been completely absorbed and understood by the general public, as evident in Tudor literature. Peterson is at her best when she integrates contemporary medical opinion, well-known cases of bad female behavior, and theatrical dialogue. Some illustrations from historical tomes written by medical men like Nicholas Culpeper and Amboise Paré add to her text. Peterson’s essays, however, are meant for a fairly small public, filled with “lit-crit” jargon few outside English departments would find mellifluous. Scholars interested in the history of English medicine, publishing, politics or gender may find her prose too opaque. Some of her sentences breathlessly stretch—with ellipses—to over eight lines of minuscule print. Nonetheless, this book does contribute to a better understanding of some complex scenes in early modern English drama and to what audiences understood about their meaning then that we do not now. Even with its hefty price tag, it belongs on the shelves of university libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.