Bodies, Gender, and the History of the Patient in Early Modern England

My paper offers a pre-modern perspective on one of the overarching questions posed by this Lightning Session: how does the history of the body illuminate historically contingent ideas about gender? Valuable scholarship has relied upon corporeal experiences, such as touch, violence, and sex, to recover early modern gender roles and relationships. My talk shows how the ailing body, too, offers a key site for capturing gendered beliefs and behaviors. Infirmity, after all, compelled men and women to describe their embodied states and to express a host of gendered concerns about comportment, relationships, and responsibility. Using first-hand accounts, such as diaries and letters, my talk introduces a few of the ways men and women perceived their debilitated bodies differently. These variations stemmed in part from ideas about men’s and women’s physical differences, but they also reflected gendered ways of living, writing, and knowing. By focusing on the words of ordinary sufferers, I suggest what it might have been like to inhabit a body in the 1600s and what that body can teach us about gender. The lived experience of physical breakdown, I argue, offers a novel approach to exploring the relationship between culture and embodiment in early modern Europe.