Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations ... iv
Acknowledgments ... v
Abbreviations ... vi
Editoral Notes ... vii
Introduction: Discovering Poison ... 1
One Visible Proofs and Works of Darkness: Poison and the Desire for Certainty ... 67
Two Speaking for the Corpse: Physicians, Autopsies, and the Unknowing Dead... 141
Three Narratives of History and the Virtues of Poison ... 221
Four Watching Flesh: Poison and the Fantasy of Temporal Control ... 279
Epilogue ... 330
Bibliography ... 335
About the Author ... 376
Index ... 377

About the Author

Miranda Wilson is assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware.

Reviews

Wilson is quite effective on how poison serves the culture as a way to think through sin and error, on the one hand, and to confront the limits to knowledge, on the other.
*American Behavioral Scientist*

This book convincingly argues that a 'preoccupation' with poison unifies texts across 'a variety of discourses' (xx).
*Modern Philology*

If identifying social flashpoints around poison is shooting fish in a barrel, the fish are worth the shooting and Wilson is a skilled marksman. Drawing lucidly on a wide range of early modern sources, Wilson shows that poisoning obsessed the early modern imagination largely because it seemed so difficult to detect and to prevent. . . .As a final note, I must commend the author for her choices of absorbing illustrations from Renaissance books; they enhance the present volume immensely. In all, this book is fascinating in its subject matter, articulate in its presentation, and admirable in its scholarship. It will, no doubt, provoke much thought in students and scholars of the Renaissance.
*Renaissance Quarterly*