Finn Manders (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
finnella.manders.23@ucl.ac.uk

Commonplacing Health and the Body in Early Modern England

This project explores the Wellcome Collection’s holding of commonplace books from early modern England to investigate understandings of health, illness and the body. I am particularly interested in examining how experiences of illness were prepared for, remembered, and recorded; how illness and mortality affected perceptions of time and the future; and the ways in which temporality and memory were translated through the body. The Wellcome Collection has a vast range of commonplace books from across this period, in a variety of languages including French, Latin and English; part of the challenge of this project will be exploring, categorising, and understanding the collection as a whole before focusing in-depth on a small number of texts.

The project is situated within both ‘histories of the everyday’ and gender history, and will make a distinct contribution to understanding of everyday life in early modern England. Commonplace books are palimpsest texts where the focus is not only on medicine and illness, but which allow ‘glimpses’ into a variety of experience. Focusing on this rich source material will allow access into ideas, cures and medical knowledge which circulated through a range of media and both public and private communication networks in the early modern period. The ultimate aim of this PhD is to contribute to our understanding of commonplace books; be part of a burgeoning ‘temporal’ conversation in early modern European history; and allow a deeper understanding of the body as a gendered, racialised and classed ‘interface’ entrenched in its historical context.

Primary supervisor: Dr Elaine Leong

Secondary supervisor: Angus Gowland

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