ABSTRACT
In a world in which health was a question of the balancing of humours, poison appeared to be everywhere. ‘All elements that have qualities that are too hot, or too cold, subtle & corrosive, are poisons’, concluded Antoine Furetière, having compiled what seemed an almost interminable list of poisonous substances, ranging from soap to menstrual blood.1 If the physical manifestations of poison and the poisoner appeared abundant in the early modern period, the presence of poison metaphors in early modern speech was equally pervasive. The 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined poisoning as said figuratively of ‘all that corrupts the mind and the mores’, whereas Furetière informed his reader that the verb empoisonner ‘is said figuratively of spiritual & moral things.’2 Poison metaphors appeared in moral, religious and medical treatises, in discussions of theatre, literature and ideology and in debates on the nature of language and writing itself.
