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- Title
Machiavelli's Medical Mandragola: Knowledge, Food, and Feces.
- Authors
Gaylard, Susan
- Abstract
This article argues that the medical discourse of Machiavelli's "Mandragola" is profoundly important both for understanding the play and for revisiting its author's philosophical and political writings. I show that discussions in "Mandragola" of doctors, medicine, eating, and elimination ultimately break down the traditional paradigm that opposes truth, nourishment, and healing to deception, problematic food, and illness. The play's extended discourse around medicine undermines the ideal of the physician who heals the state and the pharmakon of words that heal the soul (in Plato, Livy, Saint Augustine, and Machiavelli's "Discorsi"), questioning in turn notions of knowledge and truth.
- Subjects
MACHIAVELLI, Niccolo, 1469-1527; MANDRAGOLA, The (Play); ITALIAN drama (Comedy); MEDICINE in literature; FOOD in literature; FECES in literature; THEORY of knowledge in literature; RENAISSANCE literature; MEDIEVAL &; Renaissance (Literary period)
- Publication
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021, Vol 74, Issue 1, p59
- ISSN
0034-4338
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1017/rqx.2020.313