Reviews of Books

What and where is the body? Historical bodies are everywhere and nowhere. Our narratives are implicitly filled with bodies in multiple forms: there are bodies in motion--working, resisting, lusting, birthing; bodies marked by race, sex, gender, class; and figurative bodies fill the historical lexicon--bodies politic, social bodies, bodies of knowledge, bodies of evidence. Yet the bodies in traditional histories are primarily placeholders for the intellectual, emotional, or physical labor done by their inhabitants, with no significance or influence in their own right. Hence the need for historical analysis of the body in all its dimensions. Janet Moore Lindmann and Michele Lise Tarter provide a start with this original collection of essays that seeks to re-place the body in early America. In the late eighteenth century, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was inspired with awe by the human body: "the earthly frame, a minute fabrick, a Centre of Wonders" (p. 2). Taking their title from Rush, co-editors Lindman and Tarter open up this marvelous realm for students of the past. A Centre of Wonders contains fifteen pieces, plus an introduction, by an interdisciplinary set of authors--historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars--ranging over more than two centuries, from 1600 to 1830. These essays consider bodies in court records, poetry and fiction, sermons, political treatises, and medical manuals. The wide array of sources, combined with an equally diverse set of approaches, leads us back to the original concern--where and what is the body?	1
If A Centre of Wonders supplies no definitive answer, the collection does suggest ways to engage the subject. In these essays, it becomes clear that the body can no longer be taken for granted as a biological constant, outside the purview of history. To the contrary. "Both the physical and the symbolic" body, Lindman and Tarter insist, are "enmeshed in the social relations of power" (p. 2). In the dissection of those relations, the essays are at their best. No longer invisible to scholarship, bodies in these pages come to the fore, dividing and unifying, distinguishing and displaying early American cultural norms.	2
The body as metaphor commands the most attention. Seventeenth-century Puritans likened dwelling houses to bodies, envisioning windows as eyes and doors as mouths (Robert Blair St. George). Esther Burr, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, represented spiritual deliverance in terms of gestation (Susan M. Stabile). For Rush, the "unhealthy constitutions" (p. 63) of state governments after Independence were subject to the same ills as diseased bodies (Jacquelyn C. Miller). Metaphors of the body were not restricted to Anglo-Americans. They could also facilitate dialogue across cultural boundaries, as evident in English communications with native peoples east of the Mississippi (Nancy Shoemaker). Why are such images so ubiquitous? Perhaps, Shoemaker suggests, symbolizing the body is "a universal cognitive practice " (p. 213). Yet universal practices need not signify universal beliefs; as Kathleen M. Brown remarks, "Twentieth-century distinctions between metaphors and 'real' bodies might obscure more than they illuminate" (p. 81) in the early modern context. To take one example: Puritans did, indeed, employ sexual metaphors to conjure up their relationship to God, but they saw the distinction between male and female bodies in less binary terms than do modern Americans (Elizabeth Maddock Dillon). While metaphors of the body may be universal, their meanings are very much bound by time, place, and culture.	. . .