Bulletin of the Comediantes

Abstract:

Jerónima, protagonist of El amor médico (Love, the Doctor), engages in practices that challenge institutional regulations regarding the exercise of medicine and gender roles in early modern Spain. By cross-dressing to compete for royal authorization to practice medicine, treat patients, and hold a teaching position as a Crown-licensed physician, this heroine’s actions and intrigues yield a satirical vision of royal authority, moral codes, and gender conventions. This article explores how dramatic irony follows from the heroine’s subversion of gender roles in an elaborate ruse she perpetrates through cross-dressing, as well as how the comedia invites alternately reformist and satirical examinations of the medical profession. In turn, this analysis ponders the dizzying intrigue built on Jerónima’s cross-dressing and considers how the drama ultimately subverts and even ridicules the gender roles that ostensibly anchored early modern Spanish society.