Sasha Handley

From the Sacral to the Moral: Sleeping Practices, Household Worship and Confessional Cultures in Late Seventeenth-Century England

ABSTRACT This article examines sleeping practices and their spiritual meanings in English society. Sleep is one of the most fundamental experiences of everyday life, and this article examines how its temporal and spatial dimensions were shaped by a wide range of confessional groups according to theologies of salvation and resurrection from 1660 to 1700. The practices, rituals and objects that surrounded and sanctified the bedside highlight distinctive forms of sleep-piety that were supported by shifts in the provision and use of domestic space, by the pastoral objectives of Church divines and dissenting ministers, and by a flourishing genre of published spiritual guides that promoted private household devotions. This comparative study of sleeping practices nuances existing historical narratives about the fragmented religious landscape of these years. Most importantly, however, it offers a justification of the centrality of pious sleeping routines to the everyday experience of devotional practice by tracing the ways in which religious beliefs were embodied through subjective physical performances of sleep.

Deformities of nature: sleepwalking and non-conscious states of mind in late eighteenth-century Britain

Abstract:This article examines the didactic appropriation of sleepwalking reports in late eighteenth-century Britain in pedagogical treatises, conduct books, and childrens literature. It examines how and why reports of sleepwalkers were used to edify young minds and in so doing traces a critical shift in understandings of sleepwalkers, which were transformed from preternatural wonders to deformities of nature that exemplified the dangerous consequences of irrational, unregulated bodies and minds. This new role was predicated on new medical and philosophical understandings of sleepwalking and on the prioritisation of developmental psychology by pedagogues and philosophers.

Reclaiming Ghosts in 1690s England

On Wednesday 1 June 1692, a young man, about fifteen years of age, went to his bed. He had no sooner lain down than he heard ‘a Hand sweeping on the wall’. Then it came ‘with a rushing noise on his beds-head’ and ‘stroaked him over the face twice very gently’. Opening his eyes he saw before him ‘an apparition of a woman cloathed in black apparel’. Following this eerie encounter, other members of the family claimed to have seen the apparition ‘in the same room with a lighted candle’. Perplexed by these unexplained visits the mistress of this ‘Civiliz’d Family’ wrote to the editors of the bi-weekly periodical the Athenian Mercury desiring to know ‘what should be the occasion of the disturbance’ and ‘whether it be advisable to ask the question of the apparition’. Samuel Wesley (father of John), Church of England minister and co-editor of the Athenian Mercury , advised the woman to have a chat with the ghost, to find out its purpose and to discover how it might be satisfied.