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the legal history of the period. David Underdown, after
examining local English court records from the period between
1560 and 1640, found that there was “an intense
preoccupation with women who are a visible threat to the
patriarchal system,” (1985: 119) including those considered as
scolds, witches, or whores.
Therefore we note that the trial scene, wherein Hermione
is accused of adultery by her husband, reminds us of other
courtroom scenes of this period which are equally important in
the early modern European history of medicine. In these scenes,
we see that the stigmatized
female healers
are needed by the
society for their proven curative skills and yet they are also
confined and condemned by the patriarchal authorities. This
paper, in order to explore the marginalized identity of female
healers in sixteenth-century England, will primarily focus on
Paulina in
The Winter’s Tale
, for her explicit role is that of a
female healer. Although initially defined and stigmatized as a
witch, Paulina became a celebrated female physician, thereby
crossing traditional gender-socio-political boundaries. Later in
the play, Paulina’s
words
work both magically and
therapeutically to transform King Leontes’s diseased speech
into what sounds like repentance, and to animate or
“resurrect” the marble statue of Hermione
—
whom we thought
had died much earlier, though in fact Paulina had protected
her from her deranged husband by preserving her life and
deceiving him.
Keeping in mind the early modern European history of
medicine, in the case of Hermione’s revivification we may
speak of the Paracelsian iatrochemical transmutation of
lead/death into gold/life. Paulina’s “curing” words are like an
alchemical cauldron that restores the spiritual-and-physical
well-being of the
polis
, the
public body
, as well as of individual
male and female “rhetoric-infected” bodies. Scholars have not
really focused on the role of female healers (in particular