ABSTRACT
The subject of this study is itinerant performing and healing women. Underlying its structure is a suggestion I have not seen expressed elsewhere, that the specific issue of early modern European women on the professional stage as a whole, if not for all regions at all times, is profoundly linked with, and usefully considered in conjunction with, the performative marketing of medicine and cosmetics. Its investigative fields are early modern comparative literature, the history of medicine and theatre history. It redefines the traditional tools of enquiry to draw on a wide range of documents, and refocuses them so that, rather than disappearing in the shadow of a few spectacular stars, or providing peripheral footnotes for students of Rabelais, Jonson, Grimmelshausen or indeed Cavendish, these women reclaim centre stage.
