A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. .

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. ix plus 283pp.).

If, as historian Nancy Shoemaker remarks, the use of body metaphors to explain abstract concepts is "probably a universal cognitive practice, no matter the culture," then it is quite remarkable that so few scholars engaged in early American studies have chosen to analyze them until now. The publication of the inspired and inspiring new collection of essays in which Shoemaker makes that assertion, A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, marks the arrival of an important new avenue of scholarly inquiry into early America. It also introduces the work of a promising group of young scholars from diverse fields, showcasing both the continuing vitality of early American studies and the new shape of a field that has rapidly begun to embrace interdisciplinary perspectives.

In selecting the title, A Centre of Wonders, from a passage by eighteenthcentury physician Benjamin Rush, Lindman and Tarter set out to remind us that because the body is the gateway between self and world, the "source and center of interpretation," it played a central part in the new worlds created through cultural contact in early America. The body was the starting point for cultural encounters of all kinds: mediating lived experience, framing social constructions of gender, race, and power; and easing--and/or arming--all sorts of social exchanges. None of this may be news to anyone who has long been engaged by theoretical approaches to issues of embodiment, to all those with well-thumbed copies of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Laqueur sitting on their shelves. But, for many scholars of early America who have yet to engage in sustained reflection on such issues, this work presents an engaging and compelling opportunity to consider the importance of corporeality for the understanding of past rea lity.

From the starting point of the human body, the 15 essays in this collection scatter in many different intriguing directions. An essay on sexual uncleanness by historian Kathleen M. Brown describes a case of female infanticide in seventeenth-century Massachusetts in order to explore the use of categories of purity and pollution in the definition of social boundaries. Meanwhile, historian Joanne Pope Melish presents an analysis of the relationship between racism and republicanism in a two pronged essay on the mutability of the marks of servility in "white Negroes" in the nineteenth-century US and enslaved whites in the Barbary states of North Africa.

If most of the more established authors contributing to this volume are historians, the more junior scholars approach their subject from diverse disciplinary vantage points. In an excellent essay which elucidates humoral theory, Separatist theology, and European psychology with equal finesse, religious studies scholar Martha L. Finch describes the intimate interactions between Mayflower Separatists and the New World environment. Another especially noteworthy offering comes from literary critic Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, who argues lucidly and persuasively, in one of the volume's most theoretically sophisticated offerings, that Puritans were perfectly comfortable attributing aspects of female anatomy to male ministers and converts because for Puritans gender functioned less as a sign of biological sex than as a symbol of divine hierarchy. The multiple angles of analysis provided by contributors from different disciplines give this collection great vibrancy.

The editors divide the book formally into four sections: "the permeability of bodies and the environment," "demarcations of the body," "bodies in per formance," and "bodies in discourse." It is easy to see why they would eschew more predictable categories such as engendering the body, racing the body, etc., a scheme which would flatten the considerable thematic complexity of many of these essays. How, for example, would one pigeonhole the fine offering by historian Jennifer M. Spear, "'Clean of Blood, without Stain or Mixture': Blood, Race, and Sexuality in Spanish Louisiana," which probes the connections between blood lines and status, the invention of racial boundaries, and the control of women's sexuality? Still, the divisions the editors have settled on are too broad to be particularly helpful to readers, given that they make only a cursory effort to define and explain their choices in their introduction. What's more, this imprecision in section headings masks some real imbalances in the scope and range o f the essays presented.

First there are issues of geography and chronology. By my count, seven of the 15 essays deal with seventeenth-century New England, and three more with eighteenth-century New England; but seventeenth-century Virginia, eighteenth-century Spanish New Orleans, and the nineteenth-century South also make appearances. Greater variety (or stricter discipline) in the spatial and temporal bounds covered would have made for a more coherent volume.

There are also issues of topical emphasis. Class is given relatively short shrift in this volume, with the exception of Spear's work and of a piece by Jacquelyn C. Miller, who offers a fascinating exploration of the literalism of eighteenth-century ideas concerning the connection between physical health and political stability. Then, when it comes to considerations of race, too many of the authors investigate Europeans' views of Africans and Native Americans without stopping to examine such encounters from the opposite perspective-Shoemaker's fine piece on cross-cultural understandings of bodily metaphors being an isolated welcome exception. With so much disciplinary diversity, it would have been nice to have had a greater diversity of viewpoints, a fuller exploration of culturally varied views of the body.

Finally, given the editors' opening invocation trumpeting the "vital relationship" of the "human form" to the "universe," it is a bit disappointing to see so much of that universe narrowed down to the bodies of European women. While masculinity was often discussed, actual male bodies seldom were. One wishes, for example, that Teresa Toulouse, in addition to analyzing the potential of the "triumphant female body" or the "aggressive female body" as a threat to masculine control of the New England social body, had similarly considered the impact of triumphant and aggressive bodies of Native American men. The excellent closing essay by art historian Todd D. Smith (on the lack of males bodies in commemorative paintings of the War of 1812) inadvertently highlights this shortcoming with its apt if ironic title, "The Problematics of Absence." It would have been especially helpful had the editors been able to include an essay concerning male bodies in Puritan New England, the setting for so much of the work here.

Still, these are relatively small quibbles. There is only so much editors can pack into a single volume. And, when given essays as rich and interconnected as these to work with, the organizational possibilities do become kaleidoscopic. Discovering the many ways the bodies in these essays interlace to form a body of work will prove a delight for many readers. However, those who take up this volume are apt to be left with one last complaint: in many cases the twelve to fourteen page essays simply feel too short. Then again, perhaps that too is all to the good. Nearly every one of these authors has a book-length project in progress. The cultural study of the body in early America is clearly poised for a spectacular spurt of growth.