In Sleep in Early Modern England Sasha Handley provides a lively, engaging and commendably wide-ranging discussion of the sleeping arrangements of our early modern forebears. Drawing on the history of ideas, cultural history, the history of the body, and medicine and material culture the book illuminates, seemingly, every facet of early modern sleep culture. Importantly Handley focuses on the key moments of change that altered people’s perceptions of, attitudes towards and everyday practices of sleep.
The book opens with two chapters considering the health implications of sleep, and sleeplessness. Chapter 1 charts how nervous medicine altered explanations for sleep and advice to ensure healthy sleep. At the outset of the early modern era sleep was believed to corroborate the body’s digestive functions. Descriptions of healthy sleep focused on the need to maintain an upright posture to create a slope between the brain and the stomach. After 1660 medical explanations of sleep focused on the functions of the brain and nervous system. Sleep was now thought to sharpen mental acuity and sooth the nerves. Chapter 2 investigates how people attempted to secure healthy sleep. Again 1660 is emphasised as the point at which medical self-help manuals became increasingly available to the populace. Handley reveals that people actively managed their sleeping environments; securing a flow of fresh air to prevent the body from overheating and to remove dangerous miasmas, which increasingly dominated eighteenth-century advice. Bedding textiles were a crucial part of these practices as linen provided cool moderated air flow to the body, and removed impurities and dirt, while caps and nightclothes offered layers of protection from the cold and from bedbugs.
Chapter 3 argues that in the years after 1660 ‘sleep piety’ became firmly embedded in British culture, fostered by the religious upheaval following the civil wars and the interregnum. The Conventicle Acts which restricted public gatherings including religious meetings, made piety performed in the home increasingly important to dissenting religious groups. Likewise Anglican writers promoted household piety to bring together public worship and personal devotions. Bedtime prayer sought divine protection for those vulnerable night-time hours when the body was exposed to physical and diabolical dangers. Moreover, they encouraged repentance that would secure the soul if the sleeper failed to wake. A lack of restful sleep was also dangerous because it might lead to listless and drowsy devotions the following day. To avoid this people sought appropriate time and space for privacy and piety, sanctified their sleeping environments and read soothing devotional texts before slumber.
Sleep could occur in a variety of places, which Chapters 4 and 5 explore. Handley argues that in the early modern period the spaces in which sleep occurred were increasingly demarcated and specialised. Bedsteads moved upstairs, from the multifunctional downstairs rooms. These newly carved out sleeping spaces were structured to induce relaxation and feelings of security. The relocation of sleep occurred for both the masters and mistresses of households and their servants. The increasing specialisation of sleeping chambers was matched by a marked increase in the purchasing of bedsteads. What a person slept in functioned as a means of expressing social hierarchy with truckle beds being associated with economic dependency or modest social standing. Considering the materiality of sleep furniture, Handley shows that beds were often customised and personalised through fabrics. Personalised and long-owned objects provided a sense of familiarity and comfort that aided sleep, while particular colours were believed to be more soothing and relaxing, such as green which was associated with both Venus (who controlled love and sleep) and the natural world. After 1660 where people slept was ever more influenced by sociability and the availability of night-time entertainments. Visiting friends and relatives necessitated sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings and furniture. This could pose health threats to the body, as inns and other lodgings were sometimes unsanitary. Late night theatre trips, conversing and playing cards all impinged on bedtimes. This created tension between the need to engage in such activities to foster business and personal networks, and the toll that lack of sleep could have on health and well-being. Handley reveals that one interesting feature of the nocturnalisation of society was that rooms used for socialising began to feature items of furniture that facilitated day-time napping; the upholstered daybed and the sleeping chair. Sociability therefore fostered a change in attitudes that made flexible, and particularly daytime, sleeping habits more acceptable.
Handley’s final chapter returns to medical theory and argues that late eighteenth-century discussions on sleep disorders were connected to identity formation. Medical writers aligned conditions like sleepwalking with a sensitive disposition. That sleepwalkers composed poetry and spoke fluently in foreign languages revealed their inner refinement. However, in more lowly sufferers the condition revealed an inner brutish nature. Thus painters and writers played with sleep states in a bid to access the non-conscious mind and the creative genius it might release. The wider populace also used episodes of broken and troubled sleep to express their sensible identities; broken sleep could evidence that a person was in love, was deeply compassionate and caring, or was intensely focused on business concerns. The inability to sleep therefore allowed people to emphasise certain aspects of their character.
In places the book pushes the boundaries of ‘early modern’ with examples drawn from works produced in 1803 and, as a result of the core arguments, the book seems to devote more attention to the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the earlier part of the period. Given that many of the chapters focus on moments of particular change a clearer chronology in the examples might have been preferable – in places examples from the mid-seventeenth century follow examples from the late eighteenth century making it hard to follow how ideas and practices shifted. However, these are minor critiques of a meticulously researched and thoroughly evocative work. Handley closes by pointing out that there is much further work to be done historicising sleep’s story. This book will certainly be the foundation on which future scholars build and to which future scholars will turn to understand the fundamental place sleep held in early modern society.
