Perhaps because of the current concern over global warming, recent scholarship has focused attention on early modern English understandings of the environment, especially climatic change and its apparent consequences for bodily health and somatic variation. Some scholars have argued for a pervasive ‘geo-humoralism’, given the dominant idea that every body was composed of four essential humours (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the dynamic balance, or complexion, of these vital fluids was dependent on environmental causes.

However, we should avoid being overly geocentric (or too heliotropic) in our assessments. When it comes to early modern conceptions of bodily difference, we might best think in terms of an astro-humoralism. Although it also remains a historiographical commonplace that its influence declined rapidly in the later seventeenth century, I argue that astrology continued to be significant for people’s understanding of one another. This is to deny neither that astrology faced major challenges, nor that it underwent concerted reform after 1660. But time-honoured doubts about astrology’s efficacy were overtaken by a much deeper concern: that a science of the terrestrial effects of the heavens was atheistic. Paradoxically, this concern about a material necessity in nature reveals that early moderns did indeed conceive of bodily differences as innate. Contrary to scholarly assumptions that there was only one kind of humoral body – an inherently malleable one – people could and did think in terms of essential somatic types.

Mark Dawson, from the School of History at ANU, is a historian of early modern England, with a long-standing fascination for social inequality and its cultural representation.

ALL WELCOME
Please direct enquiries to Kynan.Gentry@anu.edu.au