The material body examines the embodied lives of men, women and children in England between 1700 and 1850. It is unique in bringing together the approaches of archaeology, history and material culture studies to understand the body during this period, which witnessed significant changes in people's living and working conditions.
The chapters draw on an expanding skeletal record, combining this with an extraordinarily rich documentary, historical and material culture record. Contributors integrate case-studies of individuals with larger-scale, population-level research, broadening and deepening our understanding of embodied experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They examine not just elite bodies but 'ordinary' and 'marginalised' bodies - men, women and children of the middling sort and labouring poor, reproducing female bodies, disabled bodies, the old and young, and bodies that were stolen, traded and handled. A strong focus on identities, including age, gender, class and disability, demonstrates the influence of power relations.
Embodied experience is delimited but not solely determined by the physical body. This ground-breaking book reveals precisely how the biological, physical, environmental, cultural, social and political interacted in the production of embodied experiences in the past. It represents a significant new direction in the history of the body in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
