This chapter considers the shared experiences of humans and plant-life in the vernacular traditions of medieval England c. 700–1500, considering their representation in Old English and Old Norse, Middle English, and associated literatures. In particular, it focuses on those instances in which plants, principally trees, undergo physical and emotional suffering, highlighting the ways in which these articulate the experience of individual humans and broader kinship groups. In several instances, whether directly or indirectly, these literary plant-lives also serve didactic purposes, and are used to express religious, folkloric, and/or gnomic wisdom, ranging from the elevated to the everyday. Thus, The Dream of the Rood and The History of the Holy Rood narrate the role of the rood-tree in the crucifixion of Christ and human spiritual history, whilst those of Le Fresne and The Floure and the Leafe reflect moral and social preoccupations and contemporary belief. Raising questions about the literary-cultural exploitation of plant-life to represent medieval human experience, this chapter considers the inescapability of arboreal metaphor – a consequence not only of the shared world of humans and trees, but of our shared vulnerabilities.

Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.

In Hopkins’s writing, eroticism centres on eros or amor and loving the body of Christ. In the framework of Hopkins’s spiritual eroticism, eros or amor is love. Understanding the significance of love and the body in Hopkins’s writings – his poems, sermons, spiritual writings, diaries, essays, and letters – allows us to come to a fuller understanding of his relationship with Christ. Hopkins’s vow of celibacy afforded him the freedom to express his passion for Christ through romantic and sexual tropes such as touching hands, melting and merging subjects, beating hearts, magnetic attraction, mutual gazes, kisses, embraces, fecundity, and homecoming. We shall look at some of these tropes in this chapter, many of which can be traced back to ancient Greece and the early church fathers. Ultimately, Hopkins wrote about erotic desires and tactile pleasures in a manner that was broad and expansive.

Chapter 10 analyses nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical debates surrounding hypnotism by way of a close reading of George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Criticism of Trilby has tended to focus on the extraordinary powers of Svengali to seize control of another’s consciousness in order to conduct their preternatural performances. I, however, attend to the intricately constructed physiological and psychological interiority of Trilby O’Ferrall and to the hidden spaces of the mind and body which constitute the complex, multilayered selves with which Du Maurier’s novel is preoccupied. Du Maurier, I argue, conceives of human selfhood in distinctly materialist terms, as a complicated series of caverns and recesses holding experiences and emotions, dreams and memories, latent talents, and the deep impressions of desire, pain, and trauma. His fiction probes the ways in which those depths might be sounded. In the case of Trilby, I argue, this investigation is primarily an acoustic and musical one.

This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

What is the stuff of dictionaries? And why does thinking about that stuff matter?  These are the paramount questions of this chapter. The physical print dictionary is a specter that looms large in media and the popular imagination, but dictionaries aren’t just or only big books. Accordingly, this chapter begins by drawing attention to the wide array of material incarnations dictionaries have taken – the tablets and scrolls that preceded books, the websites and apps that have superseded them. Next, it considers the materialities necessary to making and using those various forms: the evolving variety of tools available to amateur and professional lexicographers; the implements of interaction deployed by dictionary readers; the traces of production, circulation, and reception that exist in private collections and informal or institutional archives. Finally, I’ll describe some non-textual uses of dictionaries; just as dictionaries aren’t only books, they aren’t only consulted for their content but rather mobilized to a range of physical, aesthetic, symbolic ends.

This chapter discusses the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the diversity of practices and attitudes towards sexualized bodies developed by different human cultures, beginning with the works of classical anthropologists, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski. It discusses Marxist, feminist, and postmodern anthropology, and reflects on the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of the dispositif, the device of sexuality. The chapter argues that the device of sexuality—that is, that there is such a thing as “sexuality”—is modern and Western. The sexual life of the peoples studied by anthropologists is an inseparable part of their social order and its reproduction, and in no way constitutes a separate sphere of existence that can be studied as such, nor does it constitute the core of any identity, either personal or collective. The task of anthropology consists in restoring how these peoples deal with the sexual in their own social and cultural terms, respecting their radical otherness.

Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

The Voyage to Brobdingnag reduces Gulliver from the magnanimous and principled behemoth of the Voyage to Lilliput to a risible and contemptible little beast. The first section considers how Gulliver is diminished to an inconsequential creature, objectified and commodified by the giants who handle him as a freak show exhibit or a pet. The second section contends that Gulliver does recuperate his human identity, albeit in a precarious manner, by differentiating himself from animals he encounters in Brobdingnag. However, he is confronted with the disgusting physicality of humans, making his restitution of human identity highly ambivalent. The third section examines how the satire is broadened from human nature to political institutions in Gulliver’s dialogue with the king and account of Brobdingnagian society. The destabilisation of species boundaries and pessimism about human corruption in this voyage are key to the overall vision of Gulliver’s Travels.

The portrayal of male and female bodies in Gulliver’s Travels has long been the subject of critical debate, from early suggestions that Swift was motivated by personal animus against Maids of Honour to more recent studies characterising him as an inveterate misogynist or an effeminised admirer of women. This chapter suggests that the depictions of female bodies must be read alongside Gulliver’s preoccupation with his own body and its functions, and these representations should be understood in the context of a culture in which sexuality provided a recognised shorthand for political debate. The aristocratic rakish discourse of Restoration theatre, with its presentation of relations between men and women through metaphors of battle and struggle, was being challenged by the emergence of sentimental dramas celebrating marital harmony. Gulliver’s horror at female bodies and his idealisation of the social systems of Lilliput and Houyhnhnmland challenge the fetishisation of the family and reverence for domesticity that were increasingly characterising moral discourse and found their ideal form for expression in the development of the novel.

Pattern books provided guidelines for how to make garments. Chapter 8 explores approaches to the problem posed by physical intimacy between the normatively male tailor and a female client in a social and political climate characterized by avoidance of sex. Drawing the body in this environment was necessary to providing instructions but presented graphic artists with a huge challenge. A comparison of lessons in ‘how to take a measurement’ in the Mao years shows that this challenge sometimes proved too much. During the Cultural Revolution, images of women were occasionally omitted from pattern books altogether. Under these circumstances, the zhifu had virtually no competition.

As David Hillman and Ulrika Maud note, ‘the body has always been a contested site’.1 This chapter applies Sara Ahmed’s position that the racialisation of bodies occurs through a differentiation between bodies on the grounds of Otherness, and argues that the period between 1780 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 witnessed a distinctive chapter in the racialisation of British women.2 Racialisation is, as Ahmed asserts, a process that takes place in time and space, and which has ‘multiple histories’.3 Surveillance likewise can be understood as a process as much as an act, and is ‘historically present not just in technology or statecraft, but also in society and culture’.4 During this ‘long’ nineteenth century between 1780 and 1914, the long-standing idea that women were biologically distinct from men became, for the first time, legitimised by science and the Victorian state, and women’s physical bodies themselves became platforms for surveillance. In a period which has been recognised by many as a turning point for overt information collection, women became almost literal information objects.5

By attending to a common theatrical convention – the representation of both dead and apparently dead bodies by actors – Chapter 1 offers a new history of early modern English tragicomedy. In all theatrical performance, the actor’s body is semiotically volatile, for its liveliness can never be entirely circumscribed by the onstage fiction. This chapter demonstrates that the early modern theater frequently exacerbated that necessary instability by requiring its actors to feign death. Tracking instances of apparent death from the late 1580s through the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter shows that theater practitioners increasingly invited their spectators to apprehend the ambiguity of the lively stage corpse, entwining them in uncertainty by offering them less and less interpretive guidance about the actor’s inevitable signs of life. Audiences gradually came to expect that they could not know the fictional status of apparent corpses. The conventions that eventually coalesced around stage corpses enabled the rise of English tragicomedy, the hybrid genre that allowed for seemingly dead bodies to resurrect themselves without warning.

This chapter examines how Faulkner uses the trope of parchment skin in his 1932 novel Light in August to describe his racially ambiguous protagonist Joe Christmas who becomes marked as Black through a range of media forms including magazines, Bibles, blackboards, and a Kodak print. While Faulkner can be patronizing in his depictions of writing by African American characters, the use of African drumming in his story “Red Leaves” (1930) to communicate over long distances in an earlier form of writing-at-a-distance that we find in telegraphy exemplifies powerful kinds of communication by Black characters. The chapter shows how Faulkner reworks the issue of race and writing materials in Intruder in the Dust (1948), refiguring the white pencil of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in his fictional town of Jefferson into the white pencil of a flashlight beam that portends racial change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of writing by American Indian characters that range from lampoons to meditations on genre where Native literacy undercuts romantic stereotypes.

Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.