In this series for The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective blog, Dr Holly Fletcher interviews leading scholars on the subject of the history of the body. For this post she spoke to Professor Karen Harvey about her previous and current research, as well as future directions in the field.

 Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. She is an historian of the British long eighteenth century with expertise in the history of the body, sexuality, masculinity and material culture. Her latest major research project was the Leverhulme-funded ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820‘ (2021-25) which used thousands of letters by men and women to explore the relationships between the physical body, self and social identity, and experiences of ‘embodiment’. She has recently co-edited two volumes relating to the history of the body, The Material Body and Letters and the Body, and her earlier publications include The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder (OUP, 2020),  The Little Republic (OUP, 2012) and  Reading Sex (CUP, 2004).

Holly Fletcher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Sleeping well in the early modern world: an environmental approach to the history of sleep care’. Her work focuses on the history of the body and its entanglements with the material world and her research has been published in Historical Research, Gender & History, German History and Food & History. Her article ‘“Belly-Worshippers and Greed-Paunches”: Fatness and the Belly in the Lutheran Reformation’ won the 2021 German History Article Prize. She is also the recipient of a Wellcome Early Career Award (beginning Oct. 2025).

Holly Fletcher: Your latest book relating to the history of the body is the fascinating edited collection The Material Body: Embodiment, History and Archaeology in Industrialising England, 1700–1850 (co-edited with Elizabeth Craig-Atkins). The volume is pioneering in bringing together historians and archaeologists, and integrating sources, concepts and methods from these fields, to examine historical bodies. Indeed, the book’s introduction suggests that researchers in either discipline cannot fully realise the potential of concepts of ‘embodiment’ (focusing on lived experience at the intersection of the physical body and the internal world of the mind) or the ‘material turn’ (examining the enmeshment of humans and things) without working together. How has this collaborative research experience impacted on your approach to historical bodies? Were there things that surprised you about archaeological (in contrast to historical) approaches to the body?

Karen Harvey: It’s gratifying that you liked the book. It arose out of a small research and network project with Elizabeth that was itself triggered by a serendipitous conversation: I was discussing my work on the history of bodies in the eighteenth century and she chipped in, ‘we have the remains of those bodies in the archaeology department’. I had already worked on non-human (but human-made) material culture – punch bowls, clothing – but had never properly considered the body as itself a material ‘object’ of study for the historian. Working with Lizzy changed that. Together we began to explore how we might apply our combined approaches to the subject of the material body. It is a very broad-brush characterization, but generally: historians focus on the rich documentary record about the body while archaeologists concentrate on the material record (and bio- or osteo-archaeologists particularly on the remains of the human body). We curated the project, the chapters and the book to be intrinsically interdisciplinary from the start, even pairing contributors to co-write a chapter when they had presented separate conference papers.

This project has made me more alive to the intellectual pay-offs – and the joy! – of working collaboratively in teams across disciplines. We simply cannot understand what it was really like to be or to have a body in the past without some comprehension of both the physical and psychological aspects of embodiment, both of which have themselves been subject to social, cultural and material forces. I now have a clear understanding of the physical body itself as an archive, one that has been created over centuries but might also be impacted materially in a single life-time by power relationships which produce social deprivation or gendered inequality.

For me, the most noteworthy aspect of osteoarchaeologists’ working practice was their low level of comfort with a high level of inference from the evidence. This is in stark contrast to the relatively high level of comfort with a high level of inference on the part of social and cultural historians of the body, who are often using a range of devices to interpret unwritten meanings in their sources. There is rigour in both but this difference seemed really important in understanding my colleagues’ objectives and methods.

HF: Until recently you were PI of the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c. 1680-1820’ (2021- 25), examining descriptions of bodily experiences in eighteenth-century letters. Connected to this you have also co-edited the volume Letters and the Body, 1700-1830: Writing and Embodiment. This research situates the physical body within social networks relating to the household, family, friends and faith, and offers new insights into the significance of the body, and communication about the body, for such relationships. While focusing on textual sources, the project nevertheless approaches the body as both a material and discursive subject. What have been your key findings in terms of how these social bonds, and the ‘economy of body communication’ which you identify for this period, impacted on physical experiences of the body?

KH: We could come at this question from various directions. Rather than separate out the text of the letter from the physical experience of the body (so, we might say, to cleave apart thinking and the body), I wish to acknowledge how the writers of letters are palpably thinking, feeling and sensing entities. Right now, I am exploring what I refer to as ‘textual embodiment’, by which I mean the way that the body inserts itself and resides within written documents, both symbolically and materially. Many scholars have acknowledged that familiar letters were tied symbolically to the body but letters conveyed the body of the letter writer to the reader in the visual and material as well as written features of the letter. Writers described their body in often minute detail and brought attention to the way this had shaped the letter – it’s length, for example, or the handwriting. In so doing, they left their body behind in the letter. Letters were a very embodied genre, we might say. So, if we are interested in how letters or the relationships that produce them affect embodied experiences, one answer is that the technology of the familiar letter changed the way that people observed their own body in order for them write it, transformed how they forged relationships between themselves and other material objects, and rendered their experiences of the body social and intersubjective.

HF: Your earlier research on the history of the body focused on topics of gender and sexuality, including the significance of material culture for shaping lived, embodied experiences of gender. How do you conceive of the importance of material objects for shaping experiences of the body in relation to the bonds between people which you highlight in your work on ‘social bodies’? Or put more simply, what role do material things play within the social world of bodies?

KH: Letters are a wonderful example of a material object that shaped experiences of the body. People report the powerful impact that a letter might have – intense joy or sometimes anger – on receiving a letter. But of course, it’s not the material object alone that has this impact but the things that it carries or has embedded within it (love, family, desire). How to understand this ‘connectedness’ or ‘relatedness’ is always a principal concern when working on letters – after all, they are objects created to connect people at a distance. There is a large and growing literature that can help us understand and conceptualize relationships between or through people, things and the world. Work by Tim Ingold on ‘entanglement’ has had a huge impact; I am also noticing people engage more and more with Jennifer Mason’s idea of ‘affinities’. All this has changed the way we understand the role that material things play in human society. One of the points of difference between scholars in this area is how far they see humans as distinct or central to the larger picture. But there is now consensus that objects have ‘agency’ or provide ‘affordances’. Coming at this from my perspective as a historian of the body, I can see that how the body interacts with material things makes it one object among others: furniture, clothing, drinking vessels, modes of transport. In each case, the objects change and influence one another: forms of movement (of walking, gesture, dance) are facilitated or not by particular types of clothing, while clothing adapts itself to the body. As a historian of the body I also have access to the products of human cognition: of planning, designing, emoting, imagining and dreaming. These have also shaped the social world of bodies. Any work on the social world of bodies has to account for all of this, because it is this totality that makes up experience.

HF: In some of your earliest publications you called for historians to investigate both the material and discursive elements of embodiment and sexuality, and you argued for a history of the body that did not simply focus on scientific and medical discourse but encompassed sources beyond these fields. These are themes which have been taken up enthusiastically by historians of the body over the past two decades and have also shaped your research on the subject. Do you feel that there is more work to be done to address these particular issues? And how do you see the field developing in the future?

KH: More work to do? Yes! Tucked away in brown folders or box files or bound registers on shelves in local, regional or institutional archives are a treasure trove of manuscripts that could enable historians to reconstruct the lives of people who are still underrepresented in our history of the past. Were this linked to the surviving osteoarchaeological record we would have a phenomenal opportunity to embody this past.

Featured image: Letter from Christiana Shuttleworth to Ann Hare, undated: Sheffield Archives, Hare and Elliot Family, LD1576/5 [7].

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