Karen Harvey

What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950

I is now over ten years since John Tosh asked the question, “What should historians do with masculinity?” The history of masculinity was then emerging as, and has since become, a burgeoning field of enquiry, with close (although not always uncontested) links with women’s history, gender history, and the history of sexuality. This seemed a good point to take stock of the central themes and questions that have emerged. The articles in this special section survey the findings of historians of masculinity in Britain from the early sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries in order to assess what has been achieved and where the main gaps lie, where the field might be going, and what insights into the relationship between gender and change are yielded by a long-term chronological perspective. The articles that follow originate from a one-day colloquium, held at the University of Sussex in September 2003. Contributors with expertise in a range of different periods were invited, although it was intended that each contribution should overlap chronologically to aid the identification of key themes. Contributors were asked to reflect on four central questions. First, in what ways has masculinity (as both represented and experienced) been defined as a concept and deployed as an analytical category by historians? Second, what methodologies have been employed by historians of masculinity, and how have different approaches influenced

The little republic : masculinity and domestic authority in eighteenth-century Britain

1. Introduction 2. The Language of Oeconomy 3. Words into Practice 4. Keeping House 5. Identity and Authority 6. Conclusion: Oeconomy and the Reproduction of Patriarchy Bibliography

The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth¿Century England

The claims of Thomas Laqueur for a shift from a one-sex to a two-sex model of sexual difference are incorporated into many recent histories of gender in England between 1650 and 1850. Yet the Laqueurian narrative is not supported by discussions of the substance of sexual difference in eighteenth-century erotic books. This article argues that different models of sexual difference were not mutually exclusive and did not change in linear fashion, but that the themes of sameness and difference were strategically deployed in the same period. Thus, there was an enduring synchronic diversity which undermines claims for linear transformation.

What Mary Toft Felt: Women's Voices, Pain, Power and the Body

In autumn 1726, Mary Toft began to deliver rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case became a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures. Toft was attended by at least six different doctors, some members of the Royal College of Physicians or attached to the Royal Court, but no doctor declared the affair a hoax until Toft herself confessed on 7 December 1726. This article focuses on Toft’s three surviving confessions in order to explore not the doctors or even wider representations of the affair but instead the person of Mary Toft herself. These rare sources give rare insight into one woman’s experiences of reproduction in the early eighteenth century. The essay engages with recent work on recovering women’s voices in the past, reconstructing Mary Toft’s words and her embodied and affective experience of the affair. These documents suggest a revision to our understanding of the hoax of 1726, one that situates the affair not in the context of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment or the assumption of men’s control over midwifery, but instead in the context of power dynamics amongst women in the practices of early-modern reproduction and birth.

Oeconomy and the Eighteenth-Century House: A Cultural History of Social Practice

ABSTRACT How can we recover domestic practices from the past? Tackling this question takes us to the very heart of the historical task of reconstructing events from past time, and in a particularly acute way. For historians of domestic practice, the perennial methodological questions concerning the availability of sources and the limits of our knowledge are only too familiar. The problem goes deeper, however. History as a discipline is fundamentally empiricist, yet the linguistic turn has generated a debate about the disciplines materialist underpinnings, about how “experience” is formed and how past experience is best investigated. The problem appears particularly clear when focusing on .“practices.” Focusing on middling-sort men and the eighteenth-century house, this article suggests a way to move past a too-common distinction between “prescription” and “practice.” The article argues that combining discourse analysis with careful readings of manuscript sources allow us to come to a better understanding of experience, a state of being that is always both material and discursive.

Visualizing Reproduction: a Cultural History of Early-Modern and Modern Medical Illustrations

Written as a response to a conference exhibition of medical illustrations of reproduction, this article considers the gains of an interdisciplinary study of medical illustration to both historians and medics. The article insists that we should not only be attuned to the cultural work that such representations perform but also that such illustrations are the product of material medical practices and the often humane impulses that drive them.

Tangible Things: making history through objects

drawing heavily on the letters written home to his mother and sister; but when it comes to Pompeii itself, Rowland must admit that unfortunately the Mozart males did not provide Maria Anna and Nannerl with any details about their Pompeian visit (110). As far as the specific influence of Pompeii goes, hard evidence must be replaced by speculation, as is also the case with the 1921 visit by the Crown Prince Hirohito, whose excursion to Pompeii was brief and essentially undocumented. This might be a minor quibble, though, if we allow that Rowland’s particular strength is in assessing the importance not so much of Pompeii specifically, but of the entire Bay of Naples. Most of her visitors engage as meaningfully with the city and its environs — from the catacombs to the chapels, Vesuvius to Cumae – and Rowland in fact offers an expert overview of how a visit to Pompeii, and an encounter with its grim images of death in the form of casts or skeletons, or (in the case of Herculaneum) its subterranean passages, is repeatedly mirrored in the experiences that were on offer elsewhere in Campania too. In this sense, perhaps the emphasis in Rowland’s title is really on its first word. The ancient city is shown to be just one component (albeit a very important one) of the powerful effects that the entire area might exact on its visitors, and it cannot be properly understood without looking outward from Pompeii. Joanna Paul The Open University Joanna.Paul@open.ac.uk

‘Envisioning the Past: Art, Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.

Locating Privacy in Tudor London. By Lena Cowen Orlin

This is a remarkable book, twenty years in the making. It should be read by historians concerned with privacy and the home, the history of early-modern London and women, and those with an interest in historical writing and narrative. It offers an insightful reassessment of the meaning and practice of privacy in early-modern England, and presents a compelling and intricate reconstruction of one woman’s life against that backdrop. Orlin also raises important questions about the past and our writing of it. Can we locate privacy prior to the familiar spatial and textual locations of seventeenthand eighteenth-century privacy – the closet, the study, the diary and autobiography? Orlin’s aim in this book is to locate earlier, ‘alternative forms of privacy ... in their own terms’ (p. 3). Orlin moves past the traditional sources of privacy, pulling together in new ways a large range of sources, including material culture, visual sources, personal writings and institutional records. One consequence is the identification of different forms of ‘privacy’: interiority, intimacy, anonymity, secrecy and solitude. Two narratives are woven through eight chapters. The odd chapters are case studies linked by the figure of Alice Barnham (born c. 1523). This narrative begins (in Chapter 1) with Orlin’s reattribution of a family group portrait of 1557. Contending that this depicts Alice Barnham and two of her sons, Orlin undertakes a thorough study of Alice and her husband (a prosperous draper who became one of the fifteen richest merchants in the city). The even chapters represent cultural and social histories of space. Orlin engages critically with long-standing arguments that physical changes in the domestic interior from the sixteenth century were motivated by a desire for material ‘privacy’. In this respect the book links to recent works on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that contest whether newly configured spaces were experienced as ‘private’. Privacy is not the material outcome of historical change but was (as Orlin puts it here) ‘a problematic’ (p. 70) and ‘a menace to public well-being’ (p. 192). The case-study chapters place the broader changes in the context of an urban middling-sort family. And the two narratives work together very well. The case (in Chapter 2) that the Great Rebuilding did not produce newly private houses is underscored by the account (in Chapter 3) of the rebuilding of the London Company of Drapers’ Hall, in which privacy becomes a corporate tool, ‘an instrument of oligarchy in the Tudor public sphere’ (p. 114). The Barnham’s parlour, by contrast, would have been used for many different occasions by different types of people. The porosity of houses and the scarcity of material privacy – based on Orlin’s research into accidental, built, vandalized and other holes in London homes – coexisted with powerful notions of secrets (in Chapter 4). The social value of these secrets – private B O O K R EV IE W S