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Vernacular bodies : the politics of reproduction in early modern England / Mary E. Fissell.
Kislak Center for Special Collections - Furness Shakespeare Library (Van Pelt 628) GT2465.G7 F57 2004
Available
Van Pelt Library GT2465.G7 F57 2004
By Request
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Fissell, Mary Elizabeth.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Birth customs--England--History.
- Birth customs.
- Childbirth--England--History.
- Childbirth.
- Human reproduction--England--History.
- Human reproduction.
- Human body--Social aspects--England.
- Human body.
- Human body--Symbolic aspects--England.
- Human body--Symbolic aspects.
- Human body--Social aspects.
- History.
- Great Britain--History.
- Great Britain.
- Great Britain--Politics and government.
- Politics and government.
- England--Social life and customs.
- England.
- Manners and customs.
- Physical Description:
- viii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Summary:
- Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.
- Contents:
- Introduction
- Reforming the body
- The womb goes bad
- Protesting and preaching
- Henry Jessey, Sarah Wight, and the struggle to make women's bodies into knowledge
- Culpeper's radical book
- Reforming the family and refiguring the body in the English Revolution
- The restoration crisis in paternity
- Conclusions.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [250]-276) and index.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.
- ISBN:
- 0199269882
- OCLC:
- 56655781
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