A Centre of Wonders - by Janet Moore Lindman & Michele Lise Tarter (Hardcover)

About the Book

Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have implications for the study of gender...

Book Synopsis

Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have implications for the study of gender, sexuality, masculinity, illness, the "body politic," spirituality, race, and slavery. The first book devoted solely to the history and theory of the body in early American cultural studies brings together authors representing diverse academic disciplines.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources--including itinerant ministers' journals, Revolutionary tracts and broadsides, advice manuals, and household inventories--they approach the theoretical analysis of the body in exciting new ways. A Centre of Wonders covers such varied topics as dance and movement among Native Americans; invading witch bodies in architecture and household spaces; rituals of baptism, conversion, and church discipline; eighteenth-century women's journaling; and the body as a rhetorical device in the language of diplomacy.

Review Quotes

A Centre of Wonders provides early Americanists with an illuminating introduction to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. While most historians of the body concentrate on gender, essays here also engage questions of conquest, strategies of colonization, and constructions of race In an excellent and refreshingly brief introduction, Lindman and Tarter provide a crash course in the analytical paradigms grounding the history of the body.... This anthology comprises the research of outstanding, mostly young scholars working with skill and perspicuity. If those are foretastes of books to come, we may expect a rich and illuminating outcome.

A well-assembled collection of fascinating essays, A Centre of Wonders opens many interpretive possibilities. If we follow its example, the early American body will assume its rightfully complex and complicating role in historical narratives.

All of the essays in A Centre of Wonders stimulate us to think about the human body in novel and original ways, and by so doing, to gain deeper insight into the early modern mind.

Each of the volume's essays assumes that the human body was an important measure of cultural suppositions about the world and examines a different aspect of the body's meaning in early America.... The result is that often promised but rarely achieved object: an interdisciplinary project with contributions from scholars of history, art history, the history of science, and literature. And the range of topics considered is remarkable, demonstrating that concern over the body is not imposed by current scholars on the past but deeply embedded within the past.

The publication of the inspired and inspiring new collection of essays, A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, marks the arrival of an important new avenue of scholarly inquiry into early America. It also introduces the work of a promising group of young scholars from diverse fields, showcasing both the continuing vitality of early American studies and the new shape of a field that has rapidly begun to embrace interdisciplinary perspectives.

The American past of transcendentalism, utilitarianism, utopianism, and spiritual freedom here has its necessary counter or complement in this corporal history of early America.... While the materialism of early Americans may be less than revelatory in an age of slavery, tribal genocide and the more or less extreme proscription of women's activity, the approach is nonetheless useful to detail the interactions between, and conceptions about, bodies classified as white, black, red, male and female.

This volume brings together a range of new work on the history of the body in colonial North America.... The book is admirably interdisciplinary in the range of its contributors...

About the Author

Janet Moore Lindman is Associate Professor of History at Rowan University. Michele Lise Tarter is Assistant Professor of English at The College of New Jersey.