“A geography of names” : A genre analysis of nationality-driven names for venereal disease in seventeenth-century England

McEnery, T. and Baker, H. (2022) “A geography of names” : A genre analysis of nationality-driven names for venereal disease in seventeenth-century England. In: Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse :. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series . John Benjamins, pp. 23-48. ISBN 9789027211101

Abstract

We investigate discourses surrounding venereal disease in a wide body of seventeenth-century texts in the one-billion-word Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus. By combining quantitative methods with close reading of texts within EEBO, we explore whether perceptions of sufferers and responses to the illness itself shifted as the century progressed. In order to uncover the kinds of written works in which references to venereal disease appear, we undertake a genre analysis with the help of genre categories added to the corpus. The analysis shows that at the beginning of the century, references to these diseases were most likely to appear within historical works, while the end of the century witnesses an increase in references to venereal disease in scientific and medical texts.