Reading ambiguous bodies
Creators: name: Wilson, Jennifer Ingles
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2018

description: The central argument of this dissertation is that the religio-political contests of the post-Reformation period were shaped by―and in turn shaped―a fundamentally ambivalent early modern epistemology of the body. The post-Reformation period in England saw the rise of heated disputes between Catholics and Protestants and between different branches of Protestantism. These conflicts were waged over licentious and tantalizing topics such as the status of Catholics tried for treason; over the truth or falsity of demon possession and exorcism; and in relation to murder trials and the meaning of suspicious deaths. Polemical narratives were written for a popular audience and had both political and religious implications: one side often reflected 'official' or state interests while the other positioned itself in opposition to the crown. I demonstrate that religious and political conflicts were shaped by a number of key intellectual shifts taking place in the spheres of law and medicine, shifts which both supported and undermined the body as a trustworthy source of proof. While these shifts allowed religious polemicists to make radically incompatible “truth” claims based on bodily signs, it also deepened a culturally pervasive anxiety around the trustworthiness of physical evidence.   Part one of the dissertation examines contests that took place over martyrs and demoniacs between 1580 and 1640. Chapter one explores a series of cases involving the torture and execution of Catholic priests from the 1580s to the 1620s. I demonstrate that both internal official reports and polemical pamphlets used physical evidence of the tortured and executed body to ground incompatible claims about the character and nature of the person accused. I examine documents related to these treason cases alongside contemporary arguments about physiognomy, pain, gesture, and psychology, and maintain that different (and conflicting) epistemologies were enlisted depending on the religio-political position of the actor or author. Chapter two examines debates about demonic possession and exorcism, focusing on the ambivalence of physical evidence that made it difficult for both Protestants and Catholics to exploit these cases for polemical purposes. By focusing in particular on the reactions of English witnesses to the notorious French possession case in 1630s' Loudun and their attempt to interpret strange bodily signs, I identify and analyze the cultural origins of a skeptical, indeterminate religious identity inhabited by a number of figures attached to the court of Charles I.    Part two of the dissertation explores the case of Anne Greene and its connection to the intra-Protestant disputes of the English Revolution. Greene was hung for infanticide in 1650, but was later revived by the prominent Oxford physicians who had been given her body for dissection. Although physical evidence had been used to find her guilty at trial, pamphlet writers re-interpreted that evidence and the 'miracle' of her revival to make conflicting arguments for legal reform. By situating the Green case within early modern discourses and practices of forensic evidence—tests to establish the cause of a newborn's death, the use of bodily evidence in coroners' inquests and murder trials, the emergence of forensic autopsy—I illustrate the ways in which dead bodies could deceive the viewer and generate the kinds of multiple interpretations that fueled religious and political contests.      By re-contexualizing post-Reformation literature within a larger corpus of medical and legal texts, this dissertation illuminates an alternate history of early modern religious politics centered on a history of the body. Doing so breaks down sub-field boundaries that have long been in place and demonstrates the deep relationship between the history of medico-legal knowledge and gender, and histories of religious contests, politics and polemics. By taking the history of the body as my starting point, I reveal connections among confessionalized issues which have historically been examined in isolation from one another and demonstrate, for instance, that the epistemologies used to interpret demon possessed female bodies as either credible or fraudulent overlapped with those used to frame Catholic bodies in martyrological or treasonous terms. This work thus allows me to reconnect the religious struggles of the period to a transitional moment in the history of natural philosophy, enabling historians both to rethink the nature of religious identity—as flexible, skeptical, and open, rather than fixed—and to reintroduce religious dynamics into the history of early modern intellectual life.