This thesis examines the relationship(s) between medicine, the body and societal codes of masculinity in England and Scotland between c.1640 and c.1780. It responds to the way in which the men in histories of post-1660 masculinity are often disembodied, and to the comparative absence of men’s gendered experiences from the history of medicine. Its findings show that in both centuries the experience of being a man with a body that was the site of health and sickness was an open, candid, and often communal, one, inside and outside of the formal medical encounter. Thus, and on both sides of 1700, ill men had full freedom in the pursuit and acceptance of medical, familial and social assistance, while their physical suffering, and associated emotional distress, was met with sympathy. With their sick bodies the sites of honest self-examination and open discussion, it was in part this very public nature of their sicknesses that allowed men, as a gender and as individuals, independence and agency in their non-commercial health care. Indeed, later-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men suffered no constraints in their ability to respond to the vulnerabilities of their bodies, even where this involved behaviours or attributes allegedly associated with women and femininity, or inconsistent with ideals of active, independent, masculinity. These findings indicate, therefore, great continuity across the period 1640-1780, and not only in masculine ideals of and involving the male corporeality. There seems to have been significant consistency across time in men’s social and medical experiences of both sickness and their pre-emptive preparation for it, and in an apparent collective self-confidence concerning their corporeal masculinity, their sex, and, possibly, even their sexual potential. Indeed, these sources suggest that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men had a resilient sense of self-identity (and personal masculinity), conceptually separable from the corporeal body and its known fragilities.

This thesis examines Milton’s concern with the idea of public speech, using Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to reveal what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics, and culminates in a reading of Samson Agonistes. The premise of the thesis is that political writers of Milton’s time were preoccupied with all forms of oratory, and, even when not setting down speech originally given orally, thought of themselves as orators, and of their interventions as public speech. Thus the period saw a ‘pamphlet war’ which, for all the possibilities raised by the medium of print, was nevertheless conducted under the sign of spoken utterance, and the emergence of a print culture preoccupied with the idea of orality. Preferring Arendt’s to the Habermasian model usually invoked in interpretation of this material, the thesis focuses on Samson Agonistes, and the polemical prose of Milton and his contemporaries, exploring Greek (and Roman republican) conceptions of public speech as action, the dichotomy of oikia and polis, distortion of language in ‘dark times’, the distinction between ‘labor’ and ‘work’, and the role of the artist. The inquiry also relates Milton to seventeenth-century debates about language, and to the tradition of classical rhetoric. Given contemporary concern with ‘manliness’ as classical virtu, and with the relative merits of the muscular Attic and ‘feminine’, Asiatic, Ciceronian styles, the thesis considers the influence of Renaissance rhetorical handbooks, and their description of poetry and ornate speech in terms of such apparently feminine pastimes as embroidery or applying make-up. Probing issues of gender and genre, in particular romance, the thesis examines the problematisation of rhetoric and the figure of the orator under the political and historical pressures of the time, to investigate Milton’s dramatisation of the beneficent and malign forms and uses of oratory.

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John Tillotson (1630-94) was one of the most frequently published and widely read authors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but he remains one of the most poorly understood. This thesis provides an account of Tillotson 's place in literary and religious culture by analysing the publishing of his sermons, his reception by various constituencies of readers, and the development of his status as a canonical author. I argue that Tillotson's sermons are significant objects of literary study. Tillotson should be considered alongside not only the canonical literary authors of the late seventeenth century, but also their eighteenth-century successors. The first chapter reads Tillotson's sermons in the context of the religious debates of the late seventeenth century, showing how he contributed to anti-popish and trinitarian controversies, and discussing the strategies he used to position his sermons in print. Chapter 2 uses biographical works and print portraits to chart the development of Tillotson's posthumous reputation, and its effect on his status as an exemplary author. In the third chapter I investigate Tillotson in relation to other large sermon collections of the Restoration period, arguing that the various guides to the corpus of sermons in print encouraged readers to organise and systematise the sermons they read. Chapter 4 shows how Tillotson's sermons became part of the canon of theological works used by students and clergymen. The final chapter discusses how far this canon was extended to the laity, investigating the various formats in which the sermons were both sold and given to lay readers. The early nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in the works of both English Reformers and Caroline divines. In this context, as the concluding section shows, Tillotson became an author of historical rather than contemporary relevance.

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