Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Alun Withey is a historian of medicine and the body, and a Wellcome Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Withey's work on the medical history of early modern Wales (2012) was awarded the EAHMH Book Prize in 2013. His current research project explores the health and hygiene history of facial hair in Britain c. 1700-1918.

• Introduction: Framing the Enlightened Body1. Shaping the Body: The politics of posture2. Shaving and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain3. Managing the Body: The material culture of personal grooming4. New Ways of Seeing: sight, spectacles and self-fashioning5. Surgical Instruments and Bodily TransformationConclusion: (RE)constructing the Eighteenth-Century Body?

“Divided into seven short chapters, Withey’s book … functions as a valuable introduction to the study of the intersection of consumer culture, new industrial processes (particularly the production of ‘cast’ or ‘crucible’ steel) and the cultivation of what Withey terms the ‘purposeful management of the body during the Enlightenment’. … Technology, Self-fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-century Britain is a very readable and useful work of cultural history.” (Jonathan Sawday, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 30 (1), February, 2017)