Introductory description

The body has become a central theme in social and cultural history. This 30 CATS final-year module explores the topic within early modernity c.1500-1750. While our principal geographical focus will be England, we will regularly draw comparisons with other European countries, namely Italy, Spain and France. Just like today, early modern men and women exhibited a profound preoccupation with the body. They lived in their bodies as we live in ours, but the meanings they assigned to this mysterious phenomenon were very different. The module proceeds from the assumption that bodily events are deeply cultural phenomena, powerfully mediated by historical context. It therefore seeks to uncover the conception and experience of a distinctly pre-modern body, and encourages students to think about how these attitudes differ from, and are comparable to, those held today. We will consider how the early modern body was conceived and experienced in various states such as pregnancy, sickness and death. We will explore how bodies were treated in particular contexts: judicial, penal, epidemical. Cases of dissection will reveal what it meant to open and inspect a human corpse. Stories of bodies marked by supernatural and occult forces will illuminate a world where human beings were conceived as ‘ensouled’, and fundamentally linked to the motions of the superlunary and heavenly spheres. We will trace the meaning of bodily functions such as feeling and sensing. We look at how sexual and racial difference was constructed. Studying a period of major religious, intellectual and political upheaval, we also explore how these changes produced shifts in the understanding and significance of the body.

Seminars will draw on a variety of rare and fascinating primary sources including natural philosophical, medical, religious and didactic texts, as well as court records, diaries, letters, medical recipe books and doctors' casebooks. We will explore what this material can reveal about the manifold ways in which early modern people understood and experienced the corporeal world. We will also consider how foregrounding ‘the body’ provides an optic through which to explore broader historical themes such as power, identity and the human condition.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Histories of the Body: Approaches, Methods and Debates

2. The Early Modern Body: Humours and Fluids

3. Man’s “Double Nature”: Body and Soul

4. Knowing the Body Part 1: Reading Bodily Signs

5. Knowing the Body Part 2: Vernacular Medicine and “Body Work”

6. Reading week

7. Feeling and Sensing

8. The Maternal Body

9. The Sick Body

10. The Dead Body

Term 2

1. Bodies Incised: Early Modern Surgery

2. Bodies Opened: Anatomy and Dissection

3. Bodies on Trial: Legal and Penal Contexts

4. Bodies and Epidemics

5. Holy and Unholy Bodies

6. Reading Week

7. Monstrous Bodies

8. Race

9. Sexuality

10. Regulated Bodies

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• By the end of the module students should be able to: 1. Demonstrate a sound knowledge of the ways in which early modern people understood and experienced bodily events.
• 2. Select, analyse and deploy relevant primary sources for independent research and study.
• 3. Intervene in scholarly arguments in the field, demonstrating an awareness of historiographical debates, methods and approaches.

Indicative reading list

Introductory Secondary Reading:

Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (1995).

Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Aldershot, 2002).

Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Oxford and Lexington, 2005).

Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (2003)

Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (2004).

Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (2007).

Wietse de Boer and Christine Goettler, eds., Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (2012).

Susan Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (2016).

Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (2018).

Katherine Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (2019).

Kevin Patrick Siena, Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain ( 2019).

Introductory Primary Sources:

Anon, Aristotle’s Master-piece, or The Secrets of Generation displayed in all the parts thereof (1684).

Anon, A treatise concerning the plague and the pox discovering as well the meanes how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions (1652).

Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: Or, The Whole Body of Man (1615).

Henry Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (1607).

Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: or the whole art of midwifry discover’d (1671).

Online Resources:

• Early Modern English Books Online (EEBO)
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
• Old Bailey Online
• Burney Collection of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Newspapers Online
• English Broadside Ballad Archive – http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/
• The Proceedings of the Old Bailey – http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
• London Lives – http://londonlives.org/

Research element

The main assessment for this module is written coursework:

▪ 1500-word essay (10%)

▪ 3000-word source-based essay (40%)
▪ 3000-word essay (40%)

In each of these assignments students will be expected to engage in independent research. For the two 3,000-word essays this will be particularly important. Here, students will have the opportunity to identify, shape and present independent, original research founded in a broad reading of secondary and primary sources.

Subject specific skills

This course aims to:

1. Introduce students to the historiography of the body in Britain and Europe c.1500-1750.

2. Enable students to historicise the body, particularly through the analysis of relevant primary sources.

3. Encourage students to use the history of the body as a way of understanding broader aspects of early modern society and culture.

By the end of the module students should be able to:

1. Demonstrate a sound knowledge of the ways in which early modern people understood and experienced bodily events.

2. Select, analyse and deploy relevant primary sources for independent research and study.

3. Intervene in scholarly arguments in the field, demonstrating an awareness of historiographical debates, methods and approaches.

Transferable skills

Enhanced presentational and debating skills.

Enhanced communication skills.

Confidence in the techniques of independent research and data analysis.

Enhanced use of information technology in research and learning.