Sweet and Clean?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Accurate Picture ◽  
Old Bailey

Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over 30 years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient’s linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practised. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases—plague, smallpox, and typhus—that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of

The introduction outlines the historiography on cleanliness and the influence of Georges Vigarello on early modern social history and history of the body. It reviews both the philosophical and the practical aspects that make researching cleanliness so challenging. On one hand, the prejudices of contemporary observers and commentators are acknowledged and, on the other, the practice of cleanliness is so habitual it goes unnoticed and unrecorded. The methodology for the book is described, first to use traditional documentary sources from a variety of media to elucidate what advice was given about cleanliness in early modern England. In order to determine whether such advice was followed, a study of the material culture of cleanliness is proposed and outlined, acknowledging that it may be more successful for linen than for bodies. Finally the drawing together of these various strands of research is emphasized.

Domestic Homicide in early modern England

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

One of the most striking features of recent writing on early modern social history has been the emergence of the family as a subject of central concern. As befits an historical area being subjected to new scrutiny, much of this concern has expressed itself in the form of specialized, and often narrowly-focused articles or essays.1 To these have been added a number of more general works intended to examine the broader developments in and implications of family life in the past.2 Several themes within family history have already received considerable attention: the structure of the family, for example, a topic already rendered familiar by earlier work on historical demography; the concomitant topic of sexual practices and attitudes; and the economic role of the family, especially in its capacity as a unit of production. These are, of course, important matters, and the research carried out on them has revealed much of interest and consequence to the social historian; this should not, however, obscure the existence of a number of other significant dimensions of family life in the past which await thorough investigation.

scholarly journals Wheresoever the Body Is: Image, Matter, and Corporeality on Shakespeare's Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Matthew Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emblem Books

What does the visual culture of early modern England, and the ways in which that culture articulated specific notions of corporeality, tell us about the actor’s body on Shakespeare’s stage?  This article locates one answer to that question in the popular emblem books and the somewhat more rarefied cosmographical treatises of the day.  Digging in these sources reveals an understanding of the body that is grounded first and foremost in corporeality – the body, before it was anything else, was matter.  As such, I argue that the actor’s body on the early modern stage served as an instance of irrefutable and irreducible materiality, ‘lending’ its materiality to the abstractions and absences that Shakespeare’s theatre so readily ‘bodied forth.’However, as a wealth of scholarship on the body has suggested over the past few decades, things are not this simple.  The body appears in these arenas as a very specific kind of matter, and matter itself is shown to have a complex relationship to ‘form’, or the immaterial realities of life.  I argue here that the nature of the body-as-matter, and indeed of matter itself, is fruitfully understood in terms of two related early modern concepts: prima materia, and man as microcosm.  These ideas were most in circulation in the distinct but kindred fields of alchemy and cosmography, and their visual manifestations offer a perspective on the theatrical body that does not reduce the body to simplematter, but still acknowledges its profound materiality, and the effect that the body-as-matter has on stage-work as a whole.

scholarly journals England and the Catholic Reformation: The Peripheries Strike Back

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285
Author(s):  
James E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Early Modern English

AbstractAlthough the Protestant Reformation has traditionally been the focus of research on early modern England, the last two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in scholarship on the experience of the country’s Catholics. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England have been central since the topic’s inception as a subject of academic interest, and the field has more recently captured the attention of, amongst others, literary scholars, musicologists and those working on visual and material culture. This article is a position paper that argues early modern English Catholicism, though not doing away with all continuities from before the country’s definitive break with Rome, was fully engaged with the global Catholic Reformation, both being influenced by it, but also impacting its progression. Whether through reading and writing, or more physical expressions of mission and reform, English Catholicism was a vital part of the wider Catholic Reformation.

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