ABSTRACT
In sixteenth-century England, there was a disease known as ‘green sickness’. In this chapter I will be discussing how ideas about this condition developed during the sixteenth century, examining in particular the relationship between lay ideas of disease and ‘official’ medical versions of the female body. Although I have already mentioned the role of Johannes Lange as the ‘creator’ of the precise symptom picture of the disease of virgins, I have deliberately chosen to start, not with him, but with green sickness in English vernacular sources. There are two reasons for this strategy.
