A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (review)

If, as historian Nancy Shoemaker remarks, the use of body metaphors to explain abstract concepts is “probably a universal cognitive practice, no matter the culture,” then it is quite remarkable that so few scholars engaged in early American studies have chosen to analyze them until now. The publication of the inspired and inspiring new collection of essays in which Shoemaker makes that assertion, A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, marks the arrival of an important new avenue of scholarly inquiry into early America. It also introduces the work of a promising group of young scholars from diverse fields, showcasing both the continuing vitality of early American studies and the new shape of a field that has rapidly begun to embrace interdisciplinary perspectives.

In selecting the title, A Centre of Wonders, from a passage by eighteenth-century physician Benjamin Rush, Lindman and Tarter set out to remind us that because the body is the gateway between self and world, the “source and center of interpretation,” it played a central part in the new worlds created through cultural contact in early America. The body was the starting point for cultural encounters of all kinds: mediating lived experience, framing social constructions of gender, race, and power; and easing—and/or arming—all sorts of social exchanges. None of this may be news to anyone who has long been engaged by theoretical approaches to issues of embodiment, to all those with well-thumbed copies of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Laqueur sitting on their shelves. But, for many scholars of early America who have yet to engage in sustained reflection on such issues, this work presents an engaging and compelling opportunity to consider the importance of corporeality for the understanding of past reality.

From the starting point of the human body, the 15 essays in this collection scatter in many different intriguing directions. An essay on sexual uncleanness by historian Kathleen M. Brown describes a case of female infanticide in seventeenth-century Massachusetts in order to explore the use of categories of purity and pollution in the definition of social boundaries. Meanwhile, historian Joanne Pope Melish presents an analysis of the relationship between racism and republicanism in a two pronged essay on the mutability of the marks of servility in “white Negroes” in the nineteenth-century US and enslaved whites in the Barbary states of North Africa.

If most of the more established authors contributing to this volume are historians, the more junior scholars approach their subject from diverse disciplinary vantage points. In an excellent essay which elucidates humoral theory, Separatist theology, and European psychology with equal finesse, religious studies scholar Martha L. Finch describes the intimate interactions between Mayflower Separatists and the New World environment. Another especially noteworthy offering comes from literary critic Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, who argues lucidly and persuasively, in one of the volume’s most theoretically sophisticated offerings, that Puritans were perfectly comfortable attributing aspects of female anatomy to male ministers and converts because for Puritans gender functioned less as a sign of biological sex than as a symbol of divine hierarchy. The multiple angles of analysis provided by contributors from different disciplines give this collection great vibrancy.

The editors divide the book formally into four sections: “the permeability of bodies and the environment,” “demarcations of the body,” “bodies in performance,” and “bodies in discourse.” It is easy to see why they would eschew more predictable categories such as engendering the body, racing the body, etc., a scheme which would flatten the considerable thematic complexity of many of these essays. How, for example, would one pigeonhole the fine offering by historian Jennifer M. Spear, “‘Clean of Blood, without Stain or Mixture’: Blood, Race, and Sexuality in Spanish Louisiana,” which probes the connections between blood lines and status, the invention of racial boundaries, and the control of women’s sexuality? Still, the divisions the editors have...