Ties of Intimacy: The Body and the Early Modern Family

Using the body as a lens, this chapter demonstrates how the varied needs of physical bodies reinforced but also disrupted and transformed the structure, practices and relationships of the family between 1639 and 1820. It draws on over 3000 familiar letters written between 1650 and 1820, mostly by a broadly defined ‘middling sort’, representing a range of different family structures and, and exchanged between friends and family across Britain. These sources reveal quotidian experiences of the body, enabling a focus not on the ritual moments around the body that are often at the centre of existing works on the family and the body, but instead on the everyday. The chapter moves past the distinction between sickness and health to expose a continuum of bodily practices in families that rethinks what and where family was in the early modern period. The chapter begins with a section on ‘Managing Bodies’, establishing that the important work of cleaning, clothing and feeding family bodies was an endeavour shared by the co-resident household-family but one that also far exceeded the physical boundaries of the house. The second section, ‘Bodies in Domestic Space and Time’ examines bodies on the move through a consideration of room use and access, practices of sitting and climbing stairs, and the location and timing of sleep, demonstrating the fluctuating nature of the household. It shows that while the fluctuating needs of the body disrupted the normative rules of domestic space and threatened domestic hierarchies, those present in the household worked hard to uphold patriarchal authority. Section three, ‘Caring Bodies’ considers the practical considerations of caring and the ways in which these reshaped both the form and the emotions of the family. Accounting for the body’s needs – whether in sickness or in health – remade the structure, practices and relationships of the early modern family.