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)
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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.
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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
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