Reading the Body Politic in Early Modern England
This course will explore the complex of attitudes that in the early-modern world bound what we now think of as the public and the private. We will consider the political and the behavioral constraints implicit in such attitudes, and the nature of challenges to them; and we will consider too the role of scientific, economic and political change in generating new ways of understanding collectivities.
Each class member in turn will be required to introduce the class discussion. You will also be asked to write one short paper, of c.5-6 pp. (due 10.12.99), and one long (c.15-20 pp.) paper, which will be due on 12.19.99. In all cases, you must discuss the topics with the instructor.
Syllabus:
8.31 Introductory: bodies and corporations
9.7 Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale; Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, chaps. 3 & 5.
How do the politics of sexuality and motherhood get worked out in Shakespeare’s play?
9.14 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, and The Taming of the Shrew; Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, chap. 7 and pp. 210-17.
How did Shakespeare voice ideals of masculinity? How did those ideals mesh with conceptualizations of a wider community?
9.21 Understanding the body: Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy [sections on anatomy, on exercise, on deformity]; William Harvey, Circulation of the Blood [selection]; Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician [selection]; Margaret Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, chap. 2.
How did understandings of early-modern bodies differ from our understandings of our own? What were the socio-political implications of anatomy?
9.28 Sex, gender and generation: Aristotle’s Master-piece: the early-modern English popular text on the subject. To be found on Wing STC microfilm, reel 1139 #14. [DMH will introduce discussion this week]
10.5 Aberrancy: witchcraft - James VI & I, Daemonologie; Dekker & Middleton, The Witch of Edmonton; Matthew Hopkins, Discoverie of Witchcraft
What were the gender and sexual politics of witchcraft
assumptions?
10.12 Aberrancy: sexual abuse - The trial of
the Earl of Castlehaven, 1631: State Trials, vol.3, cols. 401-26;
Lady Eleanor Douglas, The Crying Charge; Sommerville, Sex
and Subjection, pp. 183-242; see also Fulke Greville, 'Letter to an
Honourable Lady’
Explore the political and social attitudes implicit in this major sex scandal
SHORT PAPER DUE
10.19 Royal bodies: Elizabeth I - speeches; Thomas Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie; Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis; James VI and I, speech to parliament in 1604, letters to Buckingham of 1620 and 1623; the happy family of Charles I - Love’s Triumph, Britannia Triumphans (masques).
How was a female ruler imagined politically? How did James represent his body in its contexts? What was the relation between an affective royal domesticity and politics? How easily did rulers cope with the gendering of the body politic?
10.26 Others’ bodies: Irish and Amerindian - Barnaby Rich, Anatomy of Ireland; John Smith, The Generall History of Virginia (1624), pp. 391-402; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (1637), chs. 2, 6, 7, 15-16, 20; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (-1648, ed. Murphy), pp. 34-35, 56-57, 84, 177-87, 227-58, 351-56, 370-71.
What was the relationship between sexual and civil or religious orthodoxy? How does the body physical become political justification?
11.2 Severing the body politic: the theater of death
Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode; accounts of the regicide; Hobbes, Leviathan, frontispiece and preface; Charles I, Eikon Basilike (chapters 1, 2, 7, 21, 27); John Milton, Eikonoklastes (parallel chapters).
1649: the destruction of the king’s body, the triumph of that body?
11.9 The body in revolution - divorced? displaced?
privatized?
John Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
(extract); Gerard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush; Anna Trapnel, Cry
of a Stone, and Journey into the West; John Milton, Paradise
Lost, books 1, 2, 4
How easy did radicals find it to contend with the politics of the body? How does Milton deal with the conventional coupling of the physical and the political?
11.16 The repressed gay republican? - Andrew Marvell, Picture of Little TC, Young Love, The Unfortunate Lover, Daphnis and Chloe, The Mower against Gardens, Damon the Mower, Upon Appleton House, Poem on the Death of OC, Last Instructions, Letter to Sir John Trott
What does Marvell tell us of the pressures of living in the body politic?
11.23 Subverting the body politic: Rochester, Sodom
In what ways is Rochester’s play more than mere pornography?
11.30 The baroque body - Aphra Behn, The Rover, To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition, panegyrics on the death of Charles II, on the coronation of James II, and on Queen Mary of Modena.
Can you see in Behn a distinctively female ethic? And is there an emerging absolutist aesthetic of the body?
12.7 The body in the new order - John Locke, Letter concerning Toleration, Essay concerning Human Understanding (selections)
How does Locke reformulate the relations of the body to the world around it? How does he think of "society"?
12.19 LONG
PAPER DUE