Body

The early modern body was a microcosm of political and social relations. This cosmic body is indubitably part of a world that we have now lost, at least in Western culture, though it dominated much of the period prior to 1750. This chapter will outline the cosmology of the body and its impact on the way in which individuals experienced the material body. There were important continuities in the way in which the body was understood, experienced and represented in this period, not least in the symbolic power of the human body, especially in terms of religion and social order. Yet the history of the body in Britain from 1500 to 1750 also shows significant transformation. Changes in print culture and the public sphere, especially the publication of popular print and vernacular texts, Protestant reform, the emergence of a British nation and an increasingly commercialized economy are all observable in how the body was imagined and experienced. The Enlightenment transformed some of the frameworks for understanding the human body and the cosmic body of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had lost widespread cultural purchase by the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet the evidence of people’s everyday reports and experiences suggest the persistence of longstanding ways of understanding the body. Above all, throughout this period the body was an expression of their inner virtue and character, the centre of thought and of feeling, and the locus for the person. The early modern self was intrinsically an embodied self.