With Sleep in Early Modern England Sasha Handley contributes a full-scale study of sleep's material culture in England and a welcome addition to the scholarship on sleep in the early modern period. Covering approximately the years 1660–1800, Handley emphasizes the objects, spaces, and daily practices associated with sleep and how they relate to “embodiment” that compassed “body, mind, sensations, thoughts and emotions” (5). The book's focus on material culture connects sleep to pressing concerns about how cognitive states relate to self-knowledge, and how bodily habitus determines the ways people locate themselves in their social and cultural worlds. Sleep in Early Modern England places this integrated perspective within a cultural context defined by changes in understandings of the necessity and biology of sleep, and in practical matters of sleep hygiene.
In her comprehensive introduction, Handley emphasizes the connections among three major themes: the changing aspects of sleep's daily practice and health regimens, religious beliefs, and sociability. In addition to evidence from period medical authorities, manuscript compendia, and literary sources, she draws on significant data from probate inventories to trace the cultural significance of inherited or acquired sleep objects, such as bedsteads and linens. One strength of the book is Handley's sustained reflections on her own methodologies—in this case, the impersonal nature of certain executors, economic limitations on what objects were recorded, and such documents’ social, geographical, and gendered parameters are limiting factors, though such records still offer a long view of changes in sleep culture. Added to her discussion of these records are her analyses of surviving objects typical of early modern sleep environments and personal testimonies from letters and diaries that speak to their use. Handley is likewise forthcoming in the significant limitations of even firsthand accounts, as people are most likely to record episodes of sleep disturbance, leaving its more mundane experience less documented.
Handley continues with an overview of sleep's importance to health and well-being as described through period works of humoral medicine. Key to her summary is the way this theory of bodily function relies both on the body's interior operations and its position in material and spiritual environments. From these guiding principles for understanding sleep, Handley proceeds to explore how and if they were manifested in the actual set-up of early modern sleep spaces and bedchambers. In the second chapter she brings together examples of early modern bedding and nightwear to explore questions of sleep hygiene and how early moderns worked to secure themselves during the vulnerable state of sleep.
Concerns about the sleeper's vulnerable body and mind led to questions of religious practice within the sleeping environment, where those seeking a good night's rest undertook what Handley calls “sleep piety.” Sleep piety includes any practice that connects sleep's rituals with making one's body, mind, and soul favorable to God. She outlines spiritual regulations and devotional rituals which speak to both the physical and spiritual vulnerability sleepers felt themselves subject to.
Handley then shifts from a focus on individual objects and devotional practices to a discussion of how sleep routines accommodated the social demands of early modern culture. The affective nature of increasingly personalized bed linens and sleep environments detailed in chapter 4 sets up chapter 5, in which Handley addresses the challenges sleepers met when they were required to sleep away from home. This fascinating study details the ways bed sharing encouraged and at times inhibited sociability and rest. The research includes compelling personal testimonies about the benefits and challenges of sociable sleep.
In chapter 6, the book's final chapter, Handley begins by considering how sleep was connected to identity: people styled their sleep habits and environment as a means of self-management. Handley demonstrates how reflections on one's sometimes wayward sleep could offer moral introspection. She concludes the chapter with a look at evidence of how reports of disordered sleep contributed to developing notions of the “sensible self” (rather than the “managed self”) wherein by the late eighteenth century sleep patterns were intrinsic to psychological understandings of selfhood.
By organizing the book thematically rather than chronologically, Handley is able to make nuanced investigations into sleep and its relationship to self-knowledge from a variety of perspectives while still offering suggestive chronological developments in sleep environments and emerging psychological conceptions of the self. Handley is able to reframe, in the wake of the abundant evidence, the case for sleep's “emblematic status as the guardian of personal, social and spiritual life” (213).
Sleep in Early Modern England makes a valuable contribution to other sleep studies, including A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005), a geographically ranging study of night and sleep patterns in the preindustrial West; and literary scholar Garrett Sullivan's Sleep, Romance, and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (2012), which attends both to early modern literary representations of sleep and their philosophical intersections. Aiming to recover an event so intrinsic to and yet so frequently unremarked in daily life, Handley also suggests directions for future study, including attention to sleep habits of the poor, how sleep habits shift across the life cycle, and sleep in institutionalized spaces such as prisons and work houses. Handley's volume is sure to inspire continued inquiry into historical sleep practices. Her wide-ranging evidence, careful theorizing, and useful thematic structure deem the book of interest to historians, literary scholars, social scientists, psychologists, and even those in the biological sciences.
