The second half of the eighteenth century brought important changes in attitudes towards shaping the body. New expectations of polite conduct, deportment and de

This book explores the links between age relations and cultural change, using an innovative analytical framework to map the incremental and contingent process o

In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientif

This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity

18th century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, 'deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorte