Vernacular Bodies

Making babies was a mysterious process in 17th-century England. Fissell uses popular sources to recover how ordinary men and women understood the process of reproduction. Because the human body was often used as a metaphor for social relations, the events of high politics reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy.

Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, Prayer Books, popular medical manuals - to produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, this study looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.

Interrelated histories of colonial medicine, market and family reveal how Western homeopathy was translated and made vernacular in colonial India.

From this study of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ana Castillo arises a new model for analyzing American literature that highlights commonalities - one in which colloquial and lyrical style and content speak out against oppression.

'The Open Access publishing costs of this volume were covered by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Veni-project “Leaving a Lasting Impression. The Impact of Incunabula on Late Medieval Spirituality, Religious Practice and Visual Culture in the Low Countries” (grant number 275-30-036).' This volume explores various approaches to study vernacular books and reading practices across Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. Through a shared focus on the material book as an interface between producers and users, the contributors investigate how book producers conceived of their target audiences and how these vernacular books were designed and used. Three sections highlight connections between vernacularity and materiality from distinct perspectives: real and imagined readers, mobility of texts and images, and intermediality. The volume brings contributions on different regions, languages, and book types into dialogue. Contributors include Heather Bamford, Tillmann Taape, Stefan Matter, Suzan Folkerts, Karolina Mroziewicz, Martha W. Driver, Alexa Sand, Elisabeth de Bruijn, Katell Lavéant, Margriet Hoogvliet, and Walter S. Melion.

Bodies of Belief argues that the paradoxical evolution of the Baptist religion, specifically in Pennsylvania and Virginia, was simultaneously egalitarian and hierarchical, democratic and conservative.

This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters’ experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.