Abstract
The human body was a matter of debate during the early modern period. Ideas about how the body functioned, and about how it was comprised and differed according to each sex, were not agreed upon. In part, the blurred boundaries between science and religion caused problems for explaining human anatomy. It was not unusual for medical tracts to consider anatomy in terms of the mind, body and soul, placing mankind into the wider spec-trum of being, living and dying.1 At the same time, though, other medical books were centred solely on biological and anatomical teaching with no thought given to religiosity, and others made only passing references to the soul.2 Knowledge articulated by anatomists and medical scholars could, and frequently did, differ greatly from that of the authors of popular medical books.3 The fascination of early modern people, from the highest order of royal physicians to astrologers, almanac writers and midwives, in trying to understand the workings of the body has provided a nexus of contradictory and often conflicting information.4 The main point of disagreement stems from the acceptance or rejection of the idea that sex was a matter of degree and not difference.
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See for example, Helkiah Crooke (1615) Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: W. Jaggard);
Sir Kenelm Digby (1658) Two Treatises in the one of which, the Nature of Bodies: in the other, the Nature of Man’s Soul (London: John Williams);
Samuel Haworth (1680) Anthropologia Or, a Philosophic Discourse Concerning Man. Being the Anatomy Both of his Soul and Body (London: Stephen Foster).
See for example, Thomas Vicary (1586) The Englishman’s Treasure (London: John Windet for John Perin);
Thomas Bartholin (1663) Bartholinus Anatomy; Made from the Precepts of his Father, and from the Observations of all Modern Anatomists (London: Peter Cole);
Johann Vesling (1677) The Anatomy of the Body of Man (London: George Sawbridge). It should be noted that by 1613 Vicary’s text had been extended to include medical remedies, going through seven editions between 1586–1641.
Roy Porter and Lesley Hall (1995) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), chapter 2.
Lauren Kassell (2005) Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
Andrew Wear (2000) Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 11–45;
Bernard Capp (1988) ‘Popular Literature’ in Barry Reay (ed.) Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge), pp. 198–243;
Keith Thomas (1991 [1971]) Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 347–50.
Thomas Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Mark Jenner and Bertrand Taithe (2000) ‘The Historiographical Body’ in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds) Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic), p. 194,
cited in Karen Harvey (2002) ‘The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45:4, 899–916, p. 913.
Karen Harvey (2002) ‘The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England’, Gender and History, 14:2, 202–23. For a detailed critique of Laqueur’s Making Sex see Harvey, ‘The Century of Sex?’.
Laura Gowing (2003) Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 19.
Anon. (1599) The Anatomy of the Inward parts of Woman, very necessary to be knowne to Physitians, Surgians, and all other that desire to know themselves (London in the Black Friers).
For a more popularized account see Robert Underwood (1605) A New Anatomie Wherein the Body of Man is very fit and aptly compared: 1. To a household. 2. To a Cittie (London: William Jones).
Nicholas Culpeper (1680) The English-Physicians dayly Practise (London: J. Conyers); Haworth, Anthropologia, p. 93.
See for example, Nicholas Culpeper (1651) A Directory for Midwives: Or a Guide for Women (London: Peter Cole). Culpeper describes the generative parts as ‘two sorts’, p. 2. For detailed descriptions of the sexual organs see pp. 3–39.
Crooke, Microcosmographia; Helkiah Crooke (1616) Somatographia anthropine, Or, A Description of the Body of Man (London: W. Jaggard). The original text, Microcosmographia, is 1111 pages long, whereas Somatographia anthropine, includ-ing pictures, has 308 pages.
Ava Chamberlain (2000) ‘The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body’, William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 57:2, 289–322.
Will Fisher (2001) ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54:1, 155–87;
Will Fisher (2006) Materializing Gender in Early Modem English Literature and Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), chapter 1.
On the female body as ‘grotesque’ see Elizabeth Hallam (2004) ‘Speaking to Reveal: The Body and Acts of “Exposure” in Early Modern Popular Discourse’ in Catherine Richardson (ed.) Clothing Culture 1350–1650 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 240, 251–2.
I.R. (1600) A Most straunge, and true discourse, of the Wonderfull judgement of God (London: E. Allde for Richard Jones);
Anon. (1668) The strange monster or, true news from Nottingham-shire of a strange monster born at Grasly in Nottingham-shire (London: Peter Lillierap).
Anon. (1684) Aristoteles Master-Piece, Or, the Secrets of Generation displayed in all the parts thereof (London: J. How), frontispiece. The same image appears in an appendix to the main text entitled ‘And the Pictures of several Monsterous Births drawn to the Life’.
Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston have argued that by the end of the seventeenth century monsters of any kind were considered to be a consequence of the wrath of God to a much lesser extent than earlier in the period, and that more natural explana-tions were increasingly sought. It would appear that Crooke sought such natural rea-sons much earlier than Park and Daston allow for, as Microcosmographia was published in 1615. See Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (1981) ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present, 92, 20–54;
see also David Cressy (2000) Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chapter 2.
On the maternal imagination and the creation of monsters see Mary E. Fissell (2004) Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 64–9, 207–11;
Mary E. Fissell (2003) ‘Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Masterpiece’, William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 60, 43–74;
for a general discussion on monsters, including monstrous births, see Park and Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions’. On the gendered and politicized understand-ing of monstrous births, patrilinearity and the power of female imagination see Diane Purkiss (2005) Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), especially chapter 6, pp. 193, 201, 205–8.
Philip Stubbes (1583) The Anatomie of Abuses (London: John Kingston for Richard Jones), p. 34.
For a consideration of female hair as a ‘covering’, from the legal concept of cov-erture, see Fisher, Materializing Gender, p. 137. For hair as a natural adornment of the female sex, which defined their subjection to both God and men see William Prynne 1628) The Unlovelinesse ofLovelockes (London: n.p.); Thomas Hall (1654) Comarum akosmia. The Loathsomenesse of Long Hair (London: J.G. for Nathanael Webb and William Grantham);
Thomas Wall (1688) Spiritual Armour to Defend the Head from the Superfluity of Naughtiness (London: printed for the author and sold by William Marshall).
Paul Griffiths (1996) Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 228–32, quotation, p. 229;
see also Gregory Woods (1992) ‘Body, Costume, and Desire in Christopher Marlowe’, Journal of Homosexuality, 23:1, 69–84.
Anon. (1620) Hœc-Vir: Or, The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier (London: Eliot’s Court Press for I.T[rundle]), p. 13;
Anon. (1620) Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to Cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminine of Our Times (London: Eliot’s Court Press for I. T[rundle]).
Randle Holme (1688) Academy of Armory, or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (Chester: For the Author), p. 389.
Alexander of Aphrodisia (1670) The Problems of Aristotle, with other Philosophers and Physitians (London: Printed for W.K.), p. A6.
R.B. [a pseudonym for Nathaniel Crouch] (1698) The Vanity of the Life of a Man (London: for Nath. Crouch), p. 24.
Levinus Lemnius (1576 [first publ. in Latin, Antwerp, 1561?]), The Touchstone of Complexions: Generallye appliable, expedient and profitable for all such, as be desirous and care full of their bodylye health, trans. Thomas Newton (London: Thomas Marsh), pp. 91–2. That this edition was still being produced in the 1630s suggests that it maintained its popularity for at least sixty years.
Wigs were an expensive commodity during the period, which limited their avail-ability only to those with a large disposable income. See for example, Margaret Spufford (1984) The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hambledon Press), pp. 51, 155.
Michael Keevak (2001) Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Ownership, Portraiture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), pp. 87–9.
Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds) (1970–83) The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: Bell & Hyman), iv, 9 May 1663, 29 August 1663, 26 October 1663, 30 October 1663, 31 October 1663, 2 November 1663, 3 November 1663, 4 November 1663, 8 November 1663, 11 November 1663, 13 November 1663.
The Tudor royal surgeon Thomas Vicary, in contrast to Crooke, asserted that both female and male seed was ‘gathered of the most best and purest drops of blood in all the body’, see Thomas Vicary (1577) A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Mans Body (London: Henry Bamforde), p. M6.
John Bulwer (1653 [1650]), Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, The Artificiall Changling Historically Presented (London: William Hunt), pp. 193, 205–6.
Diana De Marly (1975) ‘The Establishment of Roman Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture’, Burlington Magazine, 117:868, 442–51, p. 451. Of course, as is the case with all fashions, not all men adhered to this trend and so it would be very unwise to suggest that all men before the Interregnum wore beards, whilst all those afterwards did not; personal preference would always have been key.
Anon. (1672) The women’s fegari[es] shewing the great endeavours they have used for obtai(ning] of the breeches (London: Printed for J. Clark), frontispiece.
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© 2011 Jennifer Jordan
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Jordan, J. (2011). ‘That ere with Age, his strength Is utterly decay’d’: Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_2
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