Bodies complexioned

Human variation and racism in early modern English culture, c . 1600–1750

Mark Dawson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526134509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Bodily contrasts – from the colour of hair, eyes and skin to the shape of faces and skeletons – allowed the English of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discriminate systematically among themselves and against non-Anglophone groups. Making use of an array of sources, this book examines how early modern English people understood bodily difference. It demonstrates that individuals' distinctive features were considered innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have characteristics in common, and challenges the idea that the humoral theory of bodily composition was incompatible with visceral inequality or racism. While 'race' had not assumed its modern valence, and 'racial' ideologies were still to come, such typecasting nonetheless had mundane, lasting consequences. Grounded in humoral physiology, and Christian universalism notwithstanding, bodily prejudices inflected social stratification, domestic politics, sectarian division and international relations.

1

Contemplating Christian temperaments

In 1702, Richard Gough completed an account of Myddle, a Shropshire parish about nine miles north from Shrewsbury. The yeoman’s work was framed as a census of the local congregation. Untangling a web of genealogical and socio-political connections, he offered a pew-by-pew prosopography, explaining how his neighbours had come to the privilege of sitting in particular seats. That concern for worldly status intruded on divine services is now well known to social historians, and in one sense Gough’s survey proves unremarkable.¹

More unexpected are his pen portraits, even if one is familiar with the manuscript’s original title, ‘Humane Nature Displayed in the History of Myddle’. Take, for instance, the figure of John Aston. ‘Sort of a silly fellow’ fond of stealing poultry, locals were quite forgiving of John’s behaviour. A jury once found him guilty of a misdemeanour rather than a felony because, Gough implied, of the way Aston looked and acted: with ‘a deformed countenance and a misshapen body; his pace or gate was directly such as if hee had studied to imitate the peacocke’.² Given the ancient commonplace that one’s physiognomy was indicative of one’s mental disposition, Gough’s initial characterisation of Samuel Downton is, by contrast, rather curious. Notwithstanding his ‘crooke [back] … grim swarthy complection and long blacke haire’, Gough reckoned that Downton had married well. He had done so thanks to a father’s careful arrangement, not any winning way of his own. Left a widower with five children, Samuel’s troubled temperament then reasserted itself. He hired a maidservant, a ‘yong Girle of obscure parentage, but some what faire’. Taking her as his wife, he frittered away his patrimony and much of his own children’s maternal inheritance too. Leaving the family name in tatters, Downton relocated to a different parish ‘where hee kept an alehouse and had great custome – perhaps for his wife’s sake whom the people there called white Leggs beecause shee commonly went without stockings’. Several years later, the pair abandoned their own offspring. Absconding to Staffordshire, ‘hee went a begging like an old decrepite person’. She sold lace, an occupation that allowed her an opportunity to cuckold Samuel.³

At various times a manorial steward, grand juryman, and churchwarden, sixty-seven-year-old Gough was no doubt well-practised in both the social and moral scrutiny of his neighbours, particularly those of humbler status. However, harder to explain are the farmer’s remarks concerning individuals of standing equal or superior to his own. He had sometimes acted on these not always charitable observations. Moreover, given that he intended his manuscript for posterity, they were ultimately public reflections which were neither always modest nor entirely deferential. As if his vantage point were the pulpit rather than the centre of the nave, he tells us about

Richard Gittins the 3rd, marryed with Margery the daughter of Francis Peplow, a wealthy farmer in Fenemeare. … [He] was of good account in his time but hee was too sociable and kinde hearted: and by strikeing hands in suretyship, hee much dampnifyed himselfe and family. Hee did not at all derogate from the charitable, meeke and comendable moralls of his father. … [Richard the third] was somewhat faire of complection and his wife was very blacke (our English proverbe says that a blacke woman is a pearle in a faire man’s eye). Hee had 7 children, 5 of them were of his complexion and those are all dead.⁴

A ‘spare leane person, whose countenance shewed that he was a passionate cholerick man, and his actions proved him soe; for hee was allways at strife with his neighbours, and much in debt’, Daniel Wicherley, esquire, was of still higher status but ranked lower in Gough’s esteem.⁵ In sum, Gough, a pious and retiring old man, was capable of engaging in the sort of Sabbath-time scrutiny and prying gossip we otherwise find recorded by that upwardly mobile man-about-London, Samuel Pepys.⁶ How was this possible? Surely once congregants in a country church were settled in their proper places, they turned to their minister and listened quietly as he spoke with higher purpose – bowing their heads, kneeling, standing, or speaking only as the liturgy required?

When it came to holding the knowing attention of their flocks, research has shown how clerics had their work cut out for them.⁷ Explaining doctrine and exhorting their parishioners to apply the church’s teachings in their daily lives, ministers had to contend with parishioners who dismissed their words as mere ‘bibble babble’ and compared attending service to ‘sharp shiting in a frosty morning’.⁸ Yet whether it were the scene of drowsy observance or lustful ogling, church-going was everywhere an inherently sociable occasion and this was precisely why laity were encouraged to look deliberately at those around them as well as to themselves. Religious discourse schooled people to understand their bodies and therefore serves us as a useful primer to early modern humoralism. From the pulpit to the graveside, in moral tracts and religious polemic, people routinely heard and read explanations of human diversity’s original causes as well as injunctions to evaluate their own bodies’ present condition.

Whether made in ancient English cathedrals or newly whitewashed American meeting houses, these evaluations often involved considering an archetypal physiognomy: that of Jesus. The leading account of Christ’s portrayal in Anglo-American popular culture suggests that the iconic representation of him – dark hair, white skin, flowing beard, and bright, blue-grey eyes – is a modern composite. Edward Blum and Paul Harvey contend that Anglo-Americans had first to overcome a profound, iconophobic reticence dating back to the time of puritan Boston, if not quite to the more dissolute Jamestown which confronted Captain John Smith. While it may be strictly correct that ‘concepts of racial hierarchy or white supremacy could not be mapped onto Christ’s body’, because the ‘racial lexicon and worldview of whiteness’ did not exist before the eighteenth century, this chapter will argue that earlier estimations of Christ’s complexion still impelled discrimination on both sides of the early modern Anglo-Atlantic.⁹ For even as every body was thought somehow flawed and the burdens of the flesh a constant trial for all human souls, it was nonetheless assumed that one sort of complexion was better than the rest. Otherwise known as a sanguine complexion, a fresh, ruddy and fair skin was a sign not simply of physical well-being but also of spiritual health.

In the beginning

The humoral body’s fundamental origin was divine.¹⁰ Giving the eulogy for the Essex minister John Warren, Henry Lukin explained:

It is [He] that did form and fashion us in the Womb. … And as the Painter mixes his Colours so as to give the right complexion to a picture; God doth so temper the several humours of the body as they [m]ay be serviceable to the mind in such manner and measure as he pleases, and hence proceeds the different temper of men whereby they are fitted for several businesses and employments: and it is God that makes to differ even in our natural Temper and Constitution.¹¹

In 1702 as Matthew Hole went into print answering an infamous tract by the physician William Coward,¹² which denied the existence of an immaterial human soul, this Somerset parson also gave a sermon, ‘Published at the Request of the Hearers’, insisting ‘’tis not in our power to be of what Stature and Complexion we please; these things are entirely in God’s hands, who, like the Potter, molds the Clay into what Form and Figure he thinks fit’.¹³ More prosaically, the artisanal image also came to mind for the antiquary Ralph Thoresby when visiting a Yorkshire ceramics factory that same year.¹⁴ The trope was a time-honoured if derivative one. As a notebook of Nehemiah Wallington, the puritan wood-turner living in civil war London, attests, it was drawn from the books of Isaiah [64.8] and Jeremiah [18.6] as much as from Genesis.¹⁵ Although the physiological mechanisms responsible for human reproduction were debated, there was a consensus that conception was, finally, somehow divine, and not simply because of ensoulment. Certainly this was the conclusion of Thomas Bedford after he described the anatomy of conjoined and short-lived twins in the preface to a printing of his sermon at their burial. His sermon did, however, outline several possible natural causes. He considered ‘defectivenesse or excesse of seminall materialls … the strength of Conceit or Imagination. … the constellations of the planets, and the configuration of their aspects’, before emphasising that none was sufficient explanation.¹⁶ Rather, Bedford underscored God’s providence and reminded his Plymouth parishioners that all were in some way deformed by original sin.

In late 1637, ‘from the very botome of my heart’, Robert Woodford therefore prayed, ‘thou hast bene so gracious as to bestowe right shape & forme uppon the Children thou hast given to me, Lord continue thy m[er]cye still in that kind to us we are not able to make one Joynt or one hayre thou alone doest all’.¹⁷ Woodford’s thanks came after Hannah, his wife, had attended Goodwife Crutchley’s labour and noticed that the newborn had mild polydactylism. Since both families moved in godly circles, Robert, a Northampton attorney, likely considered the girl’s irregularly shaped hands a test of faith; another instance of God’s infinite wisdom. Woodford’s humble recognition of God’s mercy toward his own family may have been fulsome in this instance, but it was by no means unique. During Hannah’s earlier pregnancies he, likely they together, had paid similar devotions and probably continued doing so until the safe arrival of their fourteenth and last child.¹⁸ Moreover, Samuel, their firstborn, offered the same prayers when he was about to become a father.¹⁹ A near-contemporary, Elizabeth Egerton, penned humble appeals to God that her pregnancies would result in children with ‘perfect shapes’, also remembering thanks when each baby was delivered with neither physical nor spiritual ‘deformity’.²⁰ She implored His m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and graphs
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Contemplating Christian temperaments
• 2 Nativities established
• 3 Bodies emblazoned
• 4 Identifying the differently humoured
• 5 Distempered skin and the English abroad
• 6 National identities, foreign physiognomies, and the advent of whiteness
• Conclusion
• Appendix: tables of graph data
• Select bibliography
• A methodological note
• Index