University of North Carolina Press Materia Medica: Rareza, Singularidad y Accidente en la Espana Temprano-Moderna (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures): 304

Materia médica exploresthe intersection of the sciences and humanities in Spanish sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury representations of the extraordinary within the larger scheme of the Baroque. Medical and chirurgicaltreatises, discourses, letters, broadsheets, and paratexts of the period share with the humanities thought processes,methods, patterns, and―most importantly―some forms of description. Archival evidence broadens the spectrum ofthese texts, and cases are frequently compared to similar instances in disciplines such as theology, literature, andthe law.Materia médica maps, among other notions, the imagination, the spectacular, the legendary, and the “novelesque” in scientific writing and examines the influence of the theatrical in representations of medical cases as stated by doctors themselves. The analyses of Materia médica tilt between the world of fact and fantasy and explore the effect of the descriptions of its cases on the social sphere. Review Materia medica: Rareza, singularidad y accidente en la Espana temprano-moderna is an original, rigorous, and elegantly written work; reading it is at once intellectually stimulating and amusing.--Isis JournalMateria medica demonstrates that these scientific texts, which are infrequently studied by scholars of the humanities, have deep connections to humanistic narrative techniques. . . . No doubt Rio Parra's work, along with Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas' 2014 La musa refractada: literatura y optica en la Espana del Barroco, will help bring medical and scientific discourses into the canon of texts analyzed in early modern Spanish historical, cultural and literary studies.--Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies About the Author Elena del Rio Parra is professor in the Department ofModern and Classical Languages at Georgia State University.