Early Modern Bodies

Early Modern Bodies is a wide-ranging and detailed introduction to a variety of different approaches to and perspectives on bodies in the early modern period, circa 1500-1750.

Sarah Toulalan is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Exeter, UK. She works on histories of the body, sex, fertility and reproduction, and sexuality. She is the author of Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (2007).

Introduction: Early Modern Bodies - Approaches and Contexts PART 1: THE STAGES OF LIFE Introduction: Bodies and the stages of life 1. Birth, Infancy, and Childhood 2. The Perils and Promise of Puberty 3. Adulthood: Marriage, Reproduction and Family 4. Adulthood: Single Lives 5. Old Age 6. Death PART 2: ENVIRONMENTS Introduction: Environments 7. Humankind and the Natural Environment 8. The Court 9. The City 10. Country Bodies, or Peeking into The Tax Collector's Office 11. Distant Bodies: Depicting Europeans in Early Modern China PART 3: CONTEXTS Introduction: Contexts 12. Confusions and Conflations: Sex, Gender, and Changing Notions of the Body 13. Social Rank: Plain Russet Coated Captains - the Social Semiotics of Rural Workers' Clothing, c.1500-1700 14. Race: The Early Modern English Case 15. Religion 16. Politics 17. Medicine PART 4: IDENTITIES Introduction: Identities 18. Humans 19. Non-Christian 'Others' 20. Criminals 21. Prostitutes: Identifying the Whore 22. The Body of the Witch 23. Rogues and Vagabonds 24. Soldiers and Women Warriors 25. Sodomites and Mollies 26. Sapphists and Tribades