Sleep in Early Modern England

"As I said at the start, one of the reasons I love history and one of the reasons that I’m interested in this history of the body is because it often unpicks things that we take for granted. This book really surprised me with its range. Sasha Handley talks about medicine and medical practice. She talks about the material culture of sleep. There are some great discussions, for example, of beds and places where people would sleep, and she also tries to reconstruct people’s physical and emotional experiences of this thing called sleep, which let’s face it, is tricky. Reconstructing any kind of embodied experience in the past is very difficult. But when it’s an experience during which we’re unconscious, that makes it that much more complicated! The elements of the book I’m interested in are what sleep means and the changing meanings of sleep, because they do change. She talks quite a lot about the spiritual role of sleep, and the role that sleep plays in religious or devotional practice. Then, closer to my own interests, she tells us—it’s a kind of running thread throughout the entire book—what changing understandings of sleep tell us about the body. Before the 18th century, the body is seen as a sort of fleshy container of different sorts of substances called humours, and those humours were thought to determine absolutely everything about your body and your person. There were four humours, each with a different quality and directly related to the environment. Blood, for example, is a hot humour, linked to the elements of fire. That shifts during the period covered by this book to an understanding of the body that isn’t so much based on humours, but instead on nerves. The nerves of this body are connected to a brain. The body is now a different kind of entity. It’s perceiving the environment through the senses, rather than being directly part of it. “In 18th-century Britain, with these new refined towns and culture of politeness, we might expect smells to be stamped on and removed. But actually, odour becomes even more important” One of the wonderful things that Handley does is show how the idea of sleep illuminates that change really neatly. By the end of the book, she’s talking about sensibility and dreams; she’s looking at whether people have sense perception when they’re asleep, and what this tells us about the mind. Sleep is now not merely a physical, ritual process, but more of a psychological practice. This isn’t a story of a revolution, unlike two of my other book choices, but it is about a changing understanding of the body, and a changing understanding of sleep in that context."