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School of History · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
This seminar is intended as a broadly conceived introduction to the early modern history of the human body. Candidates should not expect a concentration on learned notions of the body. Our focus is wider, as we will be engaging in, and with, socio-cultural historiography. We will be surveying popular beliefs and meanings, everyday practices and social consequences, surrounding human physicality during the early modern period, particularly in terms of their relation to class, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and race. Of equal importance will be the issues of how (and why) historians go about recovering the history of the body. While the early modern Anglophone world is our main point of departure, candidates will be able to focus their attention comparatively on other regions of Western Europe.
Class Participation
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 5
Historiographical Review: 1000 words
Learning outcomes 1, 2
Research Proposal: 1000 words
Learning outcomes 3, 4
Research Essay: 4000 words
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 36 hours of contact over 12 weeks: 24 hours of seminars and 12 hours of workshop and workshop-like activities; and b) 94 hours of independent student research, reading and writing.
An e-brick consisting of primary material and scholarly essays will be compiled and made available on WATTLE. Preliminary Reading Chaplin, J.E., Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500—1676 (2001). Feerick, J., Strangers in Blood. Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010). Finch, M.L., Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (2009). Goetz, R.A., The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (2012). Gowing, L., Common Bodies. Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (2003). Laqueur, T., Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990). Newton, H., The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (2012).