Abstract
In colonial America, as in many colonial contacts, human bodies were at the center of most discussions of self and others. In this paper, I explore how the disciplines of body, intellect, and soul were entangled at colonial Harvard College. Early Harvard was fashioned to be a bastion of Puritan ideology, where English and Native students were trained in “knowledge and godliness.” Adherence to this ideology was regulated through the production of College laws, modeled after the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, regarding comportment, action, and dress of the students and tutors of the College. Colony and College laws underscore bodily anxieties that abounded in Puritan New England regarding the dangers of witchcraft, overt sumptuous behavior, and pleasures of the flesh. I ground my discussions in current theoretical perspectives on embodiment and materiality to explore how anxieties regarding one’s body impacted embodied practices relating to dress and protection of the physical and spiritual flesh. To what extent (if any) did Puritan notions of morality and health impact the lives and material culture of students living at seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Harvard?
Souls are mixed with things, things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together.
—Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1973)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Beaudry, M. C., Goldstein, K. J., & Chartier, C. (2003). Archaeology of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Avalon Chronicles, 8, 155–183.
Beecher, H. K., & Altschule, M. D. (1977). Medicine at Harvard: The first three hundred years. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Blair, A. (2008). Student manuscripts and the textbook. In E. Campi (Ed.), Scholarly knowledge: Textbooks in early modern Europe (pp. 39–74). Zurich, Switzerland: Librairie Droz.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bremer, F. J. (1995). The Puritan experiment: New England society from Bradford to Edwards. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Brenner, E. (1984). Strategies for autonomy: An analysis of ethnic mobilization in seventeenth century Southern New England. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI.
Brown, K. M. (2001). Murderous uncleanliness: The body of female infanticide in Puritan New England. In J. M. Lindman & M. L. Tarter (Eds.), A centre of wonders: The body in early America (pp. 77–94). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brown, G. J., & Bowen, J. (1998). Animal bones from the cross street back lot privy. Historical Archaeology, 32(3), 72–80.
Cipolla, C. N. (2008). Signs of identity, signs of memory. Archaeological Dialogues, 15(2), 196–215.
Cohen, M. (2009). The networked wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Colonial Society of Massachusetts [CSM]. (1925). Harvard college records (Vol. 15). Boston: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
Colonial Society of Massachusetts [CSM]. (1935). Collections: Harvard college records III (Vol. 31). Boston: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
Cook, L. C. (1998). “Katherine Nanny, Alias Naylor”: A life in colonial Boston. Historical Archaeology, 32(1), 15–19.
Crossland, Z. (2010). Embodiment and materiality. In D. Hicks & M. C. Beaudry (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of material culture studies (pp. 386–405). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Crossley, N. (2001). The social body: Habit, identity, and desire. New York: Sage.
Culpeper, N. (1652). Culpeper’s complete herbal with nearly four hundred medicines made from English Herbs. London: Halifax: Milner and Sowerby.
Davidson, J. M. (2004). Rituals captures in context and time: Charm use in North Dallas Freedman’s Town (1869–1907), Dallas, Texas. Historical Archaeology, 38(2), 22–54.
Davidson, J. M. (2010). Keeping the devil at Bay: The shoe on the coffin lid and other grave charms in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 14, 614–649.
Dawdy, S. L. (2008). Building the devil’s empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Degler, C. N. (1984) Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America. Harper, New York.
De Marly, D. (1990). Dress in North America: The new world, 1492–1800. New York: Holmes and Meier.
Deetz, J., & Deetz, P. S. (2000). The Times of their lives: Life, love, and death in Plymouth Colony. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Finch, M. L. (2001). “Civilized” bodies and the “Savage” environment of early new Plymouth. In J. M. Lindman & M. L. Tarter (Eds.), A centre of wonders: The body in Early America (pp. 43–59). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
St. George, R. B. (1998). Conversing by signs: Poetics of implication in colonial New England culture. Winston-Salem, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
George, R. B. (2001). Witchcraft, bodily affliction, and domestic space in seventeenth-century New England. In J. M. Lindman & M. L. Tarter (Eds.), A centre of wonders: The body in early America (pp. 13–27). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gerarde, J. (1597). The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton.
Gibson, S. G. (ed.). (1980). Burr’s Hill, A 17 th Century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island. Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gilchrist, R. L. (2008). Magic for the dead? The archaeology of magic in later medieval burials. Medieval Archaeology, 52, 119–159.
Gill, H. B. (1963). The apothecary in Colonial America [microfiche]. Williamsburg, VA: Early American History Research Reports/Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Glanvill, J. (1681). Saducismus triumphatus: or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions. London: Newcomb.
Godbeer, R. (2002). The devil’s dominion: Magic and religion in early New England. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, L. B. R. (1999). An archaeology of manners: The polite world of the merchant elite of Colonial Massachusetts. New York: Springer.
Gordon, M. B. (1949). Aesculapius comes to the Colonies. Ventnor, NJ: Ventnor Publishers.
Gosden, C. (2005). What do objects want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 12(3), 183–211.
Gosden, C., & Knowles, C. (2001). Collecting colonialism: Material culture and colonial change. Oxford, England: Berg.
Gowing, L. (2003). Common bodies: Women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Graffam, G. (1981). Final report, phase III, red line extension, northwest: Excavation of the Olmstead-Goffe House Site at Wadsworth Gate. Cambridge, MA: Institute for Conservation Archaeology/Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
Graffam, G. (1982). The use of pattern in student material culture: A preliminary report from Harvard Yard. North American Archaeologist, 3(3), 207–224.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press.
Heck, D. B., & Balicki, J. F. (1998). Katherine Naylor’s “House of Office”: A seventeenth-century privy. Historical Archaeology, 32(3), 24–37.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. London: The Camelot Press.
Hill, J. (2007). The Story of the Amulet: Locating the enchantment of collections. Journal of Material Culture, 12(1), 65–87.
Hodge, C. J. (2005). Faith and practice at an early-eighteenth-century Wampanoag Burial ground: The waldo farm site in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Historical Archaeology, 39(4), 65–86.
Joyce, R. (2005). Archaeology of the body. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 139–158.
Joyce, R. (2007). Embodied subjectivity: Gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. In L. Meskell & R. W. Pruecel (Eds.), A companion to social archaeology (pp. 82–95). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Kus, S. (1992). Toward an archaeology of body and soul. In J.-C. Gardin & C. Peebles (Eds.), Representations in archaeology (pp. 168–177). Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press.
Lepore, J. (1999) The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Knopf Doubleday,New York.
Lindman, J. M., & Tarter, M. L. (Eds.). (2001). A centre of wonders: The body in early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Loren, D. D. P. (2007). In contact: Bodies and landscapes in the 16th and 17th-century Eastern Woodlands. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Mather, C. (1692). On witchcraft: Being the wonders of the invisible world. Boston: Bell Publishing.
Mather, I. (1900). Diary by Increase Mather, March, 1675–December, 1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1989). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.
Meskell, L. (2004). Object worlds in ancient Egypt: Material biographies past and present. Oxford, England: Blackwell Press.
Miller, D. (2005). Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moore, H. L. (1994). A passion for difference: Essays in anthropology and gender. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Morison, S. E. (1936). Harvard college in the seventeenth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mrozowski, S. A., Herbster, H., Brown, D., & Priddy, K. L. (2005). Magunkaquog: Native American conversion and cultural persistence. In J. Campsi (Ed.), Eighteenth-century native communities of southern New England in the colonial context (pp. 57–71). Mashantucket, CT: The Mashantucket Museum and Research Center Occasional Paper No. 1.
Mrozowski, S. A., Herbster, H., Brown, D., & Priddy, K. L. (2009). Magunkaquog materiality, federal recognition, and the search for a deeper History. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 13(4), 430–463.
Peabody Museum. (2009) “Traces of the Indian College in Harvard Yard.” Peabody Museum website. Retrieved March 19, 2011, from http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/562.
Rapoza, A. V. (1990). The trials of Phillip Reade, seventeenth-century itinerant physician. Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 15(1), 82–94.
Reis, E. (1995). The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England. The Journal of American History, 82(1), 15–36.
Reiss, O. (2000). Medicine in colonial America. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Rosenwein, B. H. (2010) Problems and methods in the history of emotions. Passions in Context: International Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions, 1, Retrieved from http://www.passionsincontext.ed.
Rubertone, P. E.. (2001) Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC and London.
Skowronek, R., & Lewis, K. (2010). Beneath the Ivory tower: The archaeology of academia. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2009). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press.
Stubbs, J. (1992). “Underground Harvard: The Archaeology of College Life.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
Stubbs, J., Capone, P., Hodge, C., & Loren, D. D. P. (2010). Campus archaeology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In R. Skowronek & K. Lewis (Eds.), Beneath the Ivory tower: The archaeology of academia (pp. 99–120). Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.
Tarlow, S. (2000). Emotion in archaeology. Current Anthropology, 41(5), 713–746.
Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled objects: Exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
White, C. L., & Beaudry, M. C. (2009). Artifacts and personal identity. In T. Majewski & D. Gaimster (Eds.), The International handbook of historical archaeology (pp. 209–225). New York: Springer.
Wilke, L. (2010). The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A historical archaeology of masculinity in a University Fraternity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Willoughby, C. C. (1935). Antiquities of the New England Indians with notes on the ancient cultures of the adjacent territory. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology/Harvard University.
Acknowledgements
I extend my sincerest gratitude to my collaborators on the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project, Trish Capone and Christina Hodge, for their support and feedback on the ideas presented in this paper. I am also grateful to Harvard University Archives, particularly Barbara Meloni, for support in navigating Harvard’s 17th century documents. As always, any mistakes in this paper are entirely my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Loren, D.D. (2016). Bodily Protection: Dress, Health, and Anxiety in Colonial New England. In: Fleisher, J., Norman, N. (eds) The Archaeology of Anxiety. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3231-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3231-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-3230-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-3231-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)