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  • A Center of Wonders: The Body in Early America
  • Bruce Burgett (bio)
A Center of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and michele lise tarter. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. 283 pp.

The body was a riot in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Given a world that had not yet abstracted corporeality from its social particularities (only then to market commodities designed for a fantasyscape within which those particulars could be bought and sold), bodies did not serve merely as metaphors for social conflict. Bodies were social conflict. They quaked, shuddered, and wept bitter tears; they were bludgeoned and scalped (and occasionally survived); they nursed, suckled, and sucked; they were purified, mortified, and ensouled; they consumed and were consumed; they were transformed from English to Native, female to male (and back again); they labored, productively and reproductively; they performed and embodied rituals of salvation and damnation; they turned suddenly white and black; they were bled, purged, nourished, and malnourished; they were hung, denounced as unclean, and celebrated as chaste; they were taken as holy brides, buggered and inseminated by man, god, and devil. Conflicts transected bodies; bodies existed only in conflict.

Such is the world surveyed in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter's edited volume of new research on the cultures and politics of the body in the prerevolutionary Americas. In it, essays by a mix of established and emerging scholars address topics ranging from legal cases of infanticide and racial impersonation to medical procedures of disease confinement and childbirth to culture practices of dance and spirit possession. Within and across these varied topics, several themes develop. One traces the transition within medical discourse away from the long-held [End Page 153] Galenian assumption that bodily health required the proper balance of the four "humors" and toward enlightenment dissection practices and visual technologies. A second links this transition to shifts in gender and racial categories: from a one-sex model of the body that ordered male and female hierarchically along a single scale of perfection to a two-sex model grounded in biological notions of sexual dimorphism; from an environmental understanding of "race" as an effect of cultivation to a biological naturalization of "racial difference" as both stable and inheritable. A third ties these two shifts in gender and racial categories to pressures applied to the "body natural" by battles over competing sacred and secular notions of the "body political."

While many of these general themes can be found in other studies, the strength of this volume lies in its social historical penchant for details. Lindman and Tarter's introduction markets the collection as broadly interdisciplinary, yet nine of the fifteen contributors work in history departments (with four more in English or American Studies, one in Religious Studies, and one in museum curation), and nearly all of the essays focus on the New England colonies. Perhaps as a result, many of the contributors hang their often remarkable research findings on hooks provided by relatively familiar narratives of British colonization and U.S. nation-formation: Robert Blair St. George mines his rich archive of architectural theories for what is exceptional to New England in its regional appropriation of the long-standing British analogy between houses and bodies (18); Trudy Eden suggests that her detailed study of food practices points toward the conclusion that British colonists mediated their national and racial identifications through the category of "English food" (39); Jacquelyn C. Miller's close reading of Benjamin Rush's writings on the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 demonstrates that he yoked medical and political metaphors of illness in order to create a united front in the "ongoing American revolution" (71). None of these conclusions are inaccurate and each of the essays showcases rich, detailed, and fascinating primary materials. But none of it is all that newsworthy either.

The exceptions that disprove this rule are notable as well. Kathleen Brown's essay on "filth-avoidance practices" in the case of Elizabeth Emerson's execution for the alleged murder of her two infants in 1693 does two things at once: it provides a thick description of childbearing practices (and the questions they would...

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