History

This article uses a wide range of evidence, including images and accounts from foreigners (primarily English and German travellers) to place the early history of coffee and cafés in France in a sharp comparative perspective. These references to the contexts of coffee consumption (where, with whom and with what other products did one consume coffee?) allow us to test and reframe key claims linking cafés, the public sphere, gender and social hierarchy in the Old Regime. The rise of the Parisian café was shaped by fears about the social inclusivity of tobacco smoke, questions of access for elite women, a focus on luxury décor and a distinctive approach to conversation and sociability. A careful exploration of these contexts of consumption can qualify and nuance our view of the café as a locus of the public sphere in the first half-century of public coffee-drinking in Paris.

What color was the blood of Africans?  A strange question, to be sure. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars writing in the Transactions of the Royal Society in London and in the Francophone scholarly journals of Europe claimed that the blood of African people was somehow "darker“ than the blood of Europeans. Physicians reported from the colonies directly: Dr. Thomas Townes, writing from Barbados in 1675, claimed to have „seen the blood of at least 20 [Africans] both sick and well... and it all is as dark as the bottom of any European blood.“  The French physician Pierre Barèrre cited his work in Cayenne to make a similar claim published in 1741. Many involved in this learned discussion lived in cities such as London or Amsterdam with significant African and Asian populations – they could have directly observed or deliberately tested the color of the blood of men from all over the world by simply walking to their city’s docks. Yet for over a century scholars considered the question unresolved and called for more inquiry into what we would consider an obvious and universal aspect of human physiology.

In my paper I will argue that questions about the color of human blood were constructed by a certain “will to ignorance” – the necessary counterpart to a Foucauldian “will to truth.” In this view, ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge; it is equally a product of history and epistemology. Drawing on research in early modern English, French, and German medical publications and travel accounts and on insights from the new field of agnotology (Proctor and Schiebinger), my paper traces the diffusion of learned ideas about African blood across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My paper will document one specific example of the relationship between the production of knowledge about Africa and the production of ignorance about Africa.

Over the last few decades the human skin has emerged as a distinct site of research for humanists, and specifically for historians of race, art, science, and medicine. In the early modern centuries Europeans at home and in the wider world transformed their understanding of skin.

This book examines the human encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism. The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church: Luther's doctrine of salvation 'by faith alone' made the foundation of the traditional funeral, intercession for the dead in Purgatory, obsolete. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead in the daily life of early modern Germany.

During the seventeenth century, Europeans intensified their study of human skin and skin color. But for these early modern researchers, skin "color" meant dark skin: its blackness demanded explanation in a way that white skin never did. Europeans sought to locate, conceptually and physically, the blackness upon which new legal categories and sources of profit depended. This new "anatomy of blackness" led physicians and scholars to examine human skin through the microscope. The Dutch-German anatomist Johann Nicolas Pechlin (1646–1706) carefully observed and clearly located the physical cause of dark skin in the rete mucosum, a mesh of pigmented vessels that lay between the epidermis and the dermis. Pechlin transformed the learned consensus on the physical site of skin color, but he also showed that this pigmented layer was entirely superficial. During the 1690s Pechlin's work was referenced by members of England's Royal Society when they discussed questions of climate, race, and skin color. This empirical approach (practiced by Pechlin and championed by the Royal Society) developed under constant pressure to fix dark skin firmly in African bodies and tie it to deeper or more innate characteristics. Thus, in the Atlantic world, blackness could never be understood as a superficial phenomenon, despite the evidence revealed by the scalpel and the microscope.

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the "Invisible World" which flared up in the 1690's helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate-from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather-refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness , light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night-ghosts, spirits, and witches-were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference-new ways of seeing and ordering the world-were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

The body in early modernity is oftentimes described as porous, malleable and in flux. From wherever we look, it seems that early modern people's bodies were under significant pressure from outward influences, as well as from their own ambitions to control them. Using approaches like embodiment, performance, sensory and cognitive history, history of emotions, material culture and history of medicine, scholars have investigated various forms of corporeal experience. This workshop brings together these interlinked fields in order to reflect upon the lived-in body in early modern Europe. We will engage with the body within a wide range of contexts, from the profound relationships between the macroand microcosms, to everyday experience like work, eating and sex. We will consider the body as willed and cultivated, but also highlight the body's vulnerabilities and propensity to sometimes do unforeseen things.

and Tuski Stannaki in the Holy Roman Empire, 1722-1734 "Two Renowned and Wild Indian Princes"? In early January 1722, an unlikely group of four travelers arrived in Frankfurt am Main and made their way to the "Imperial Crown" guesthouse. 1 The man in charge was English, styled a sea captain. The oldest of the group, he spoke no German and communicated through an interpreter later described as "a Jew in German clothing" or "an Englishman who speaks German." 2 The two othersyoung men in their twentieswere the reason the group was traveling: "they were decorated everywhere on their bodies with hieroglyphic figures and characters [.. .] and one could view them for eight Kreutzer." 3 Marked from head to foot with extraordinary images of suns, moons, snakes, as well as other figures and complex patterns, they were also battle-scarred. No one had ever seen anyone like them in this part of Europe. 4 The two men were Native Americans: Ocktscha Rinscha and Tuski Stannaki, as they later signed their names. As captives of a Carolina slave trader, their elaborately decorated bodies had become profitable curiosities to which viewing access was sold. Ocktscha Rinscha, the older man, was Choctaw; Tuski Stannaki, the younger, likely Creek. They traveled with their owner, a "Considerable Indian trader" named John Pight, and were described as slaves in the many sources documenting their time in the Holy Roman Empire. Pight took the men from Charleston, South Carolina to England in 1719, then to France in the summer of 1720. Some time later, the group of four men must have entered the Holy Roman Empire, and by January 1722, they had reached Frankfurt am Main, on their way, they explained, to Vienna. After Vienna, they went north to Breslau and then, fatefully, to Dresden, capital of the Electorate of Saxony. Of the years they spent in Europe, they lived for a decade in the lands of Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxonyfirst in Dresden, then in Warsaw. They were slaves when they entered Saxony, and it is not clear howor ifthey were ever considered free. Ocktscha Rinscha and Tuski Stannaki were tough, adaptable, cross-cultural survivors, and their story demands to be told elsewhere in more detail. By establishing some essential facts about their route through Central Europe and their reception by Germans, however, we can both establish a foundation for the further study of these men in Native history and uncover new attitudes toward skin, slavery, and Fig. 3.1: Ocktscha Rinscha and Tuski Stannaki. Details from the Breslau Sammlung von Natur-und Medicin-[.. .] Geschichten, [1722]. Courtesy of Sächsische Landesbibiothek-Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden/ Deutsche Fotothek. are given as "Illa Cadego" and "Toche Hoga") arrived in Amsterdam. Later that same year, they were brought to the Hessian court in Kassel.

Stigma presents a new history of skin that reveals powerful but unsettled conceptions of the body's surface in the early modern world. A new era of dermal marking began as intensifying global trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world.

How did people of European origin mark themselves as white in the period before 1750? By the eighteenth century educated Europeans tied whiteness to geography and heredity. They sought and amplified evidence that only Europeans could produce white offspring, and they argued against early modern European beliefs about the effects of the sun and climate on complexion and skin color.

This talk explores several forms of signaling whiteness in the seventeenth century. First, I discuss blushing: in early modern European culture skin color, gender, and virtue intersected in the female blush. By the mid-seventeenth century, visibility of blushing had become a sign of whiteness. I then examine the constitution of white skin in seventeenth-century portraiture and anatomy, showing how African skin emerges as fundamental to the scientific understanding of the skin and to the representation of whiteness.