David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and ...

556 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 3 (2006)
have emphasized how central notions of paternity
and maternity and models of reproduction
and inheritance are to both cosmologies and social
practices. Birthing the Nation is best seen in
this context.
LisaForman Cody considers along eighteenth
century, from the second half of the seventeenth
century and discussions within the Royal Society
to the 1830s and the New Poor Law. One of her
main arguments is that “sex and birth...helped
the British to demarcate individual and corporate
identities, including those of gender and the family”
(p. 302). She suggests that major shifts in
authority occurred during the period she treats:
“male experts ...replaced female midwives,
who had enjoyed a nearly exclusive control over
the world of birth and knowledge about sexuality
and reproduction for centuries” (p. 3). Cody insists
on the revolutionary nature of this change,
considering a number of contexts and case studies
in order to illustrate her wider claims. In the
process she draws on a wide range of sources,
such as prints, plays, poems, diaries and letters,
pamphlets, magazines, and institutional records.
Some of the figures and examples she uses are
familiar to historians, such as Mary Toft, who
allegedly gave birth to rabbits in 1726, and the
successful career of the Scot William Hunter.
Cody places considerable explanatory weight on
Hunter’s sympathetic relationships with his clients.
“Evidence does exist, particularly in the
case of William Hunter, that men-midwives facilitated
emotional discussion with husbands and
fathers, and played powerful roles in men’s
lives” (p. 304). She mentions Hunter’s cultural
interests in passing, and I wonder both whether
his connoisseurship and collecting might have
facilitated these relationships and how typical he
was.
It is well known that man-midwifery, one of
the most important subjects treated in the book,
elicited exceptionally ferocious emotional reactions.
Historians should always be alert to such
seemingly disproportionate reactions. It is not
surprising that there is a lot of satirical material
available. Many of the prints Cody uses fall into
this category. The interpretation of such sources
is exceptionally challenging, and it can be unclear
what is properly to be inferred from them.
Since some are by well-known figures, such as
Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, it might
have been worth paying close attention to makers
as well as to their subject matter. Yet even
the content of prints can be difficult to analyze,
and some puzzling claims are made about them.
For example, in discussing The Village Doctor
(Rowlandson, 1774), Cody notes a “marked contrast”
with another of his prints, “of a female
midwife braving a late-night rainstorm . . . from
1811” (p. 164). To me, this implies that the
woman is more positively depicted than the man.
Yet she is shown as obese, with thick lips and a
bottle, in a manner that has been seen by others
as distinctly hostile.
We know that print makers and sellers draw
on contemporary goings-on quite opportunistically—as,
of course, do many writers. And are
we to read the cases in William Smellie’s Treatise,
first published in 1752, or supposed letters
in the Sentimental Magazine (pp. 305–306)
“straight”? These are difficult areas; my sense is
that it is best to treat writings on such hotly contested
matters as, more or less, strategic fictions.
They are still valuable evidence, of course, but
they testify more to affect than to practices. Certainly
we can agree that feelings about “sex and
birth” ran extremely high in this period and that
they had powerful, diverse political resonances.
I think it is also clear that major changes took
place in Britain over this period with regard to
reproduction and that men-midwives provided
wonderfully rich material for contemporary satire
and commentary. We might usefully ponder
further on the extent to which these shifts are
properly deemed “revolutionary,” given that
they took place over a long period of time, on
the capacity of reproductive matters to be potent
political mediators in many societies, on the role
of artists and writers in responding to trends
within science and medicine, and on how their
products are best interpreted.
LUDMILLA JORDANOVA
David Boyd Haycock. William Stukeley: Science,
Religion, and Archaeology in Eighteenth-
Century England. xiii 290 pp., plates, bibl.,
index. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2002.
$95 (cloth).
The history of antiquarianism and archaeology
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has
begun to attract the attention of historians in recent
years. While this has improved our understanding
of these disciplines and highlighted the
important relationship that existed between natural
philosophy and early archaeology, there is
still much that remains to be explored about the
activities of antiquaries, how archaeology and
natural history shaped each other, and how antiquarian
researches were connected with wider
social and intellectual problems. David Haycock’s
examination of William Stukeley’s archaeological
and scientific career represents a
significant advance in our understanding of the

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 3 (2006) 557
complex relationships that archaeology in the
eighteenth century had with a diverse array of
scientific, religious, philosophical, and political
issues.
Haycock believes that in order to understand
Stukeley’s works on Stonehenge and Avebury it
is necessary to recognize the connection between
his archaeological investigations and his career
in natural philosophy. For this reason, Haycock’s
book is divided into two sections. The
first describes Stukeley’s education, his career as
a physician and natural philosopher, and his
close links to Isaac Newton. Haycock argues that
Stukeley inherited a set of ideas and problems
from Newton, some of which dealt with natural
philosophy; but he draws on recent scholarship
about Newton to show that Stukeley was also
influenced by Newton’s extensive studies of
chronology and ancient history, as well as his
speculations about theology.
Having demonstrated the Newtonian nature of
Stukeley’s various scientific pursuits in the first
section of the book, Haycock proceeds to examine
Stukeley’s archaeological studies of Britain’s
earliest antiquities, notably the stone circles
at Stonehenge and Avebury. Whereas some recent
historians of archaeology have focused on
those aspects of Stukeley’s investigations that
appear recognizable as “archaeology” while ignoring
other aspects of his work—which was
full of strange ideas about Druids and primitive
Christianity and fanciful notions of the early history
of Britain—Haycock situates Stukeley’s
ideas about Stonehenge and Avebury within the
intellectual context of eighteenth-century England.
What emerges is a remarkable picture of
the complexity and sophistication of eighteenthcentury
antiquarianism.
Haycock shows how Stukeley’s interpretations
of Stonehenge and Avebury were intimately
linked to a host of problems being debated
in the eighteenth century. Stukeley drew
on the best historians and scholars of his day to
link the ancient Britons described by Roman
writers to the descendants of Noah who repopulated
the world after the biblical deluge. Likewise,
he drew on scholars writing on natural religion,
primitive Christianity, and the idea of the
prisca theologia to link the religion of the Druids
to an ancient wisdom inherited from Adam that
had been preserved among the Druids and was
reflected in their ancient stone circles. Moreover,
Haycock finds in Stukeley’s antiquarian researches
material that links all of these issues
with contemporary theological debates about the
validity of the concept of the Trinity. Again,
Haycock traces Stukeley’s interest in this problem
in part to the Arianism of Newton and other
prominent Newtonians and the scholarly defenses
of Trinitarianism that were spurred in the
eighteenth century by this threat to orthodox
doctrine. Stukeley drew on new scientific methods
and the emphasis on the importance of careful
observation prevalent in the Royal Society,
of which he was a member, in his surveys of
ancient stone circles. And Stukeley’s interest in
British antiquities, as a member of the Society
of Antiquaries, fit well in an era of increasing
British nationalism. Thus, what emerges from
Haycock’s account of Stukeley’s antiquarian researches
are the ways that they grew out of contemporary
cultural, intellectual, and political
concerns.
Haycock draws on an impressive array of primary
sources, many of them unpublished manuscripts.
However, he does not always utilize
relevant works of recent historians as successfully.
While the first section of the book offers a
valuable account of Stukeley’s life and career in
natural philosophy and is important in establishing
its significance to Stukeley’s antiquarian researches,
the two halves of the book are not
seamlessly integrated. However, the analysis of
the second section of the book far surpasses
much that has been written in the history of early
archaeology.
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM
Claire Preston. Thomas Browne and the Writing
of Early Modern Science. xiv 250 pp.,
illus., bibl., index. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005. $75 (cloth).
Sir Thomas Browne stands tantalizingly on the
cusp between science and literature—intriguing
for his engagement with natural philosophy
through such works as Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
but perhaps better known for his metaphysical
speculations and sonorous prose. In the seventeenth
century, Browne’s high repute derived
largely from his learning, and he subsequently
delighted Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
He has since become an established part
of the literary canon. The twentieth century saw
various monographs on him, notably those by
F. L. Huntley and Joan Bennett, both published
in 1962, while a volume of tercentenary essays
edited by C. A. Patrides appeared in 1982. Most
important of all, 1981 saw the publication of
Robin Robbins’s monumental edition of the
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which devotes its entire
second volume to the painstaking analysis of
Browne’s sources.
Claire Preston comes from a background in