# > " 2 , C = - 0 ? & 6 + ,% 26 * ) #B . & 5 " 1*% = % "0 - + > D This interdisciplinary collection of seven essays relating to body studies offers a wide overview of the heterogeneous research areas and methods used in a field that has witnessed great expansion and diversification in the last two decades. The idea for the book was developed at the 2008 seminar sessions of the European Society for the Study of Englishes conference, chaired by Logie Barrow and the late honorary co-editor, François Poirier, which had the same title as the resulting publication. The essays also constitute a contribution to the fields of British Studies and, due to Fellner's contribution on changing body paradigms in Puritan New England, also to American Studies. The papers draw on different discourses and their authors are labelled in the introduction in diverse ways: linguist-lettrists, lettrists and historians. Although the papers are specialised, they are accessible and they evoke the reader's interest regardless of her/ his previous familiarity with the field in question. However, the fact that the book represents a collage of research areas may also be seen as one of its few drawbacks, as it can be difficult to specify the interrelatedness of the topics covered in each essay. Barrow sets the stage for the papers by providing succinct and informative summaries which emphasize those aspects most closely relating to the field of body studies: body-soul and gender dualism, the shift towards the binary sex model in the 18 th century, the birth of activism and human rights acts as a response to sexual violation, changes in gender domains, hierarchical views on human and animal bodies in colonial Britain, and the debate, beginning in the 19 th century, about mandatory vaccination policies, which raised the question of the rights and the ability to judge of British subjects, who were ironically enfranchised during the same historical period. The contributions cover historical developments from pre-Norman England onwards. The papers also reveal the relation of the described body perceptions to the present state of ' ( & ) & * ) ) ! " #$ " affairs, if only by exposing our own culture-bound views by comparing them to views belonging to another belief system. The collection is largely arranged chronologically, opening with a paper entitled “Body and Society in Pre-Norman England”. The author, Maria Eliferova, uses Old English texts for her analysis of body perception in pre- Norman England. In her linguistic analysis of Old English Bible translations, Eliferova turns to different uses of words relating to the dual concepts of the body and soul, concepts which are of great relevance in the history of Western thought. Eliferova evokes an image of a society which is unaware of stark body-soul distinctions, thus contrasting with world views of the later dominant Christian culture. The author claims to be dealing with more essential questions of the body and thus distances herself from issues which some theories consider to be of primary importance, such as gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, she cannot avoid including lengthy discussions about sexuality and social practices. Eliferova's analysis of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon body perception based on a corpus of Old English texts additionally points to the lack of a direct relation between the naked body, sexuality and shame, and the perception of the body as a public and not only a private concern. In “A Compleat Body of Divinity: Visions of Sexuality and the Body in Puritan New England”, Astrid M. Fellner also uses textual sources as basis for the analysis of a culturally specific understanding of the body, albeit by focusing on a single source, a New England Puritan diary, The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr. In this relatively brief, yet informative paper, Fellner provides an analysis of the evolving body perception of the diary's author and relates the text to the theories of an important shift in the understanding of the body which took place at the end of the 18 th century. This shift concerns the objectification of the biologically given body, and it resulted in a change towards a qualitative model of gender, or rather, sex differences, replacing the earlier Galenic quantitative model. The remaining five papers in the book all deal with Britain in the 19 th , and occasionally at the turn of the 20 th century. Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz provides an introduction to the Victorian period with an intriguing title of “Child Abuse and White Slavery in 19 th -century Britain”. This engaging essay, which is of interest to historians, gender scholars and sociologists alike, embeds child abuse and the so-called vile traffic in broadly viewed social issues, and, more narrowly, in well-intended social activism, which was unfortunately restricted by the middle-class value system. Richard Sibley follows Fellner with the second paper dealing with the question of gender in his analysis of the emerging phenomenon of sportswomen in the second half of the 19 th century: “Feminism versus Femininity: the Significance of Women's Sporting Dress in Britain (1860-1914)”. Echoing the discourse of the shifts in body perception mentioned in Fellner's work, Sibley describes what we today might perceive as rebellious females engaging in the masculine domain of sports. At the end of the paper, Sibley’s discussion takes an interesting turn in that he dismisses actual instances of subversive behaviour by Victorian sportswomen through his analysis of what may be seen as a self-defining element, the choice of sporting dress. The contribution by Gilbert Pham-Thanh, “Body, Size or Dress Matters: Representation of the Dandical Male Body in Some Fashionable 19 th -Century Novels”, explores the world of fashionable Victorian novels, which bear rather postmodern characteristics as they are both challenging and supporting the ruling 19 th -century phallocentric class-based society. The author analyses the dandy character constructed in the literary corpus used in this paper, and discusses the issue of preference of social over sexual intercourse of the upper-class Narcissus, who distances himself from social and gender roles. In relation to the body question, the paper follows Sibley in analysing fashion, this time in the male sphere, as a self-defining and also metonymic literary device which allows the authors of the analysed novels to implicitly describe the body, a topic which could not be addressed directly at that time. Sune Borkfelt's “The Non-Human Colonial Subject: the Importance of Animal Bodies to British Imperialism” describes the hierarchical view of human and animal bodies in the British Empire and raises the more general question of anthropocentrism, which did not disappear with the Empire. This paper is the only one in the collection to deal with non-human bodies. Borkfelt illustrates that the ideology of the civilizing European, who has the right to tame and modify nature and to educate the savage, was spread through travel reports, hunting narratives, books, and even, in more modern times, film. In the second section, the author presents European, or more precisely, British cultural practices used to challenge the level of civilization of the conquered peoples, viz. animal domestication and meat eating, which were subsequently spread within the colonies along with the ruling imperial ideologies. The final paper of the collection, written by Logie Barrow, “English Vaccinal Unworthiness of Democracy”, requires of the reader a somewhat better understanding of social changes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. For those more familiar with the field in question, the essay provides a relevant and well argued source. The debate about compulsory vaccination, still alive and well in the 21st century, paradoxically emerged at the same time as enfranchisement, causing legal changes as well as a series of debates ranging from political controversies challenging the rights of the free-born Englishmen, to medical controversies surrounding the as yet imperfect vaccination practices and class discrimination. This diverse collection will appeal to a variety of readers. It is recommendable to those who want to get an overview of possible approaches, methods and actual empirical work in body studies, while those with more specialized interests will engage in reading separate papers of the collection. Students and others generally interested in English studies will surely enjoy the stimulating and accessible texts, even without direct involvement in the research areas in question. + > D E $ ( " 9 6, 67 ' 8