Luther's Faculty Research Symposium is Coming Up!

Are you interested in sleep? Are you interested in what happens when a doctor falls asleep in 1605, and somehow magically ends up preaching a sermon for an hour and a half--with witnesses? If so: stop by the Luther College Faculty Research Symposium at 3:00 this Saturday. I'm giving a short talk on Richard Haydocke's experiences as a sleep preacher, and how they intersect with the strategies of diagnosing a sleeping speaker in Macbeth.

For details and a schedule, click on the FRS banner below:

Sleep, Virtuous Behavior, and the Adage

In a Newsweek article called "Sleep in!" (June 4 & 11, 2012, page 19), Trevor Butterworth gleefully debunks the myth that getting up early is somehow virtuous. In fact, he quotes sleep researcher Till Roenneberg, who says "We need to get rid of the old rule that the early bird catches the worm." But how old is this rule--and what are the sneaky links between early rising and moral standing, from a historical perspective?

"Early to bed, early to rise,/ Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Current in the eighteenth century, this saying links not only intelligence but also wealth to sleeping habits--presumably because those who rise "early" do so in order to work at some form of remunerative labor. Less well known--but no less morally laced--is this early modern adage, quoted by A. Roger Ekirch in At Day's Close (265): "Nature requires five [hours of sleep], custom takes seven, laziness nine, and wickedness, eleven." From a historical standpoint, then, not only the time of rising, but the length of sleep itself reflected a person's inherent moral character.

It's quite interesting, then, to realize that Butterworth's article is calling for a sea change in the way that we ascribe morality to sleep practices. Instead of judging those who sleep late, Butterworth claims, we should view them as victims of "social jet lag"--which "happens when your internal body clock wants you to stay asleep but your external social clock wants you to wake up" (19). Here, the terms of the debate seem to have switched: a sleeper's body is now framed as the correct (or, at least, legitimate) arbiter of waking and sleeping times, and society stands as the cruel taskmaster, forcing the body into routines that can lead to obesity and exhaustion. I'm not quite sure what to make of this shift--but I'm very interested in the way that it tries to decouple sleep from morality, despite hundreds of years of proverbial linkages. 

Things I Learned While Writing About Sleep

At the close of my project, I thought I'd take a minute or two to reflect about what it meant to write a dissertation on sleep. When people have asked me about my project, they tend to have a slightly disbelieving smile on their faces: "You write about looking at sleeping people?" ["And you talk about this for two hundred and eighty-eight pages??"] Indeed, yes--and I've learned some unexpected things from doing so.

1) Talking about sleep is great. It's recreational. College students in particular really enjoy that element of my topic: "I'd love to have a nap right now!" or "Man, I wish I could think about sleep all the time." Sleep is a desired state of being, and many people self-identify as lacking sleep--or, at least, lacking as much sleep as they'd like to have. So sleep is a fabulous conversation-starter, and almost a modern rhetorical commonplace.

2) Talking about watching the sleeper is weird. The same college students who are interested in sleep, in general, look at me very strangely when I say that I specifically wrote about watching people sleep. I'd like to tie this, in part, to the modern (roughly post-Cartesian) emphasis on a person's internal experience of sleep, which has almost completely subsumed the early modern idea of watching and (ideally) safeguarding one's bedfellows. (The early moderns definitely did think about a person's experience of sleep, as well--but they also often contextualized it within a community setting, in ways that we no longer frequently think about.) In other words, the idea of watching a sleeper is "weird" from a modern stance because the idea of being watched in a vulnerable state openly challenges the idea that the internal person always retains power over himself. It makes folks uncomfortable. There are overtones of surveillance, peeping-tom-ness, judgment, and maybe even desire--signalling both its complexity and the multifaceted nature of its ethical ramifications.

3) Sleep can't be detached from communities. Whether I'm talking about sleep or actually sleeping, there are always people nearby, and their presence makes sleep an essentially ethical and relational matter. Although the sleeper himself or herself does not actually perceive this community, its existence forms the vital context against which the sleeper signifies, and within which the sleeper can be either safeguarded or harmed.

Almonds, Onions, and Lettuce

What do these foods have in common, you may ask? Well, according to Sir Thomas Elyot (writing in The Castle of Health, in 1539), they're the early modern equivalent of Lunesta. Here are a few excerpts from Elyot's useful self-help guide, which tells users how to balance their humors by eating particular foods:

Almonds "do... clense without any byndynge, wherfore they purge the breste and lunges, specially bytter almondes. Also they do mollifye the bealy, prouoke sleape, and causeth to pysse well, fyue or syx of theym eaten afore meate, kepe a manne from beynge drunke, they be hot and moyst in the fyrst degre." (22v)

Lettuce: "AMonge all herbes, none hath soo good iuyce as letise: for somemen do suppose, that it maketh aboundance of bloude, al be it not very pure or perfyte. It doth set a hote stomake in a very good temper, & maketh good appetite, and eaten in the euennynge, it prouoketh slepe, albe it, it neither doth lowse nor bynd the bealye of his owne propertie. It increaseth mylke in a womans breastes, but it abateth carnall appetite, and moche vsynge therof, hurteth the eye syghte. It is colde and moyst temperatly." (23v)

Onions "styre appetite to meate, and put awaye lothsomnesse, and lowse the bealy, they quycken syght: and beynge eaten in great abundance with meate, they cause one to sleape soundely." (26v--theoretically. The printer had a bit of a mix-up, and labeled page 26 '29' by mistake.) (all italics mine)

So: if you're hoping to fall asleep after your Thanksgiving feast, maybe eat salad with your turkey? (Or just rely on the turkey itself. Which, as we all know, not only contains tryptophans, but is also "hot and moist.")

Sleep Advice from the Elizabethan Era

In 1636, a book called The Haven of Health was republished in London, in its sixth edition. This book, quite frankly, is a gem. After 240 chapters of recipes and helpful hints about improving your health through food (tip: "raw Creame well boiled with a little Sugar, is a good nourishing meate, and good for a weake student"), Thomas Cogan turns his attention to sleep:

"...it is most wholesome to sleepe first on the right side, that the meat may the better descend to the bottome of the stomacke, and be nearer to the liver. Which is to the stomacke as fire to the pot, and after to turne to the left side. For this change doth greatly ease the body, and helpeth concoction. But to lie upon the backe, causeth flegme and other humours to fall into the hinder part of the head, where is the originall of the sinewes, and by that meane the spirits being stopped, the nightmare (as they call it) and palsie, and such like maladies be engendred. Again to lie on the belly, draweth the humours to the eyes, and so hurteth the sight. Yet it helpeth them that have feeble digestion. And we must not onely regard that wee lie on the... side, but also that wee lie with our heads somewhat high, well bolstered up, having sufficient clothes upon us, least that while naturall heate is within about digestion, the outward parts be grieved with cold. It is good also to weare a kerchiffe, or some such like thing in the night on our heads. But to have the feet covered with shoes or otherwise, is very hurtfull to the sight and memory, and distempereth the whole body with heate..." (274).

Clearly, I should not be asking for those fuzzy socks for Christmas.

Sleeping on Stage

Hi again! I took a month-long hiatus from blogging to concentrate on my teaching and my dissertation, but I wanted to mention a really interesting staging of sleep that I saw at a conference recently.

A few weekends ago, I went to Grand Valley State University to take part in their Shakespeare Festival Conference, and I saw a performance of Richard III. Set in a half-modern world of gangs and graffiti, the performance featured a large tarp mounted on the left side of the stage, where a running tally of the dead bodies was kept in hot pinks, blacks, and greens.

Here's where sleep comes in. During the portion when Clarence dies (a death caused by a chainsaw, incidentally, and not a butt of malmsey), the murderers approach from stage right--and Clarence's bed is behind the tarp on the left. The audience can see Clarence's outlined shadow, breathing quietly, but not his features, clothes, or expression. As the murderers do their brutally comic routine, Clarence sleeps, and the audience watches--but only halfway, because the actual body has been replaced in our sight by a simulacrum, and that simulacrum is characterized by the graffitied death count that literally overwrites it. It's a fascinating and rich tableau (complicated even further when the chainsaw-wielding murderer does his thing, and the tarp gets splattered with hot pink 'blood.')

There are a few importance consequences of this staging. First, it literalizes the early modern connection between sleep and death--and the correspondence between the sleeper and the already-dead, codified in language and numbers (and record-keeping). Second, it puts distance between the audience and the (doomed) sleeper, by interspersing a written record of deaths to separate them. Third, it extends the possibility of never quite knowing the identity of a sleeping body, because its features, expression, and even clothing are not distinctly visible--even though the outline can be seen.

I'll have to think more about this production, and its consequences for the portrayal of Clarence's body, but I wanted to jot down some notes, and to update the blog!

The Acid Test: Sleep in the work of Dorothy L. Sayers

I've been planning the introduction to my dissertation recently (which means that it's almost done! Deep breaths!), and I've been re-reading the passages that led me to think about watching a sleeper in the first place. Principal among them is a gorgeous piece of prose from the Renaissance scholar Dorothy L. Sayers--who translated Dante, but is most famous for her detective stories. In this passage, Lord Peter Wimsey (her main sleuth) has gone punting with Harriet Vane (the woman he loves, and has loved, unrequited, for years). When he falls asleep in the boat, Harriet studies his sleeping form:

"It was a neat and noiseless kind of sleep... but asleep he undoubtedly was. And here was Miss Harriet Vane, gone suddenly sympathetic, afraid to move for fear of waking him and savagely resenting the approach of a boatload of idiots whose gramophone was playing (for a change) 'Love in Bloom...' Another person's sleep is the acid test of our own sentiments. Unless we are savages, we react kindly to death, whether of friend or enemy. It does not exasperate us; it does not tempt us to throw things at it; we do not find it funny... But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty..." (Gaudy Night, Hodder and Stoughton, New English Library [1935] 2003, 361).

That passage has always stopped me cold. Sayers never comes out directly and says that Harriet has fallen in love with Peter. Instead, there is a look, there are a few brief reactions--and then there's this passage, the observation of a suddenly beloved sleeper, a simultaneous admission of his vulnerability and her own. With the option open to her, Harriet chooses not to indulge in "conscious superiority"; the acid test has shown her feelings for a vulnerable man who cannot openly reciprocate them yet, and she reacts by resenting the boatload of idiots (and their gramophone).

Then, fabulously, she goes through Wimsey's belongings, and starts reading his books until he wakes up. First up: Religio Medici. Second: Donne. With the choice of these books/writers, Sayers is framing the encounter in the context of not only sleep/love, but sleep/death, and--more specifically--sleep/early modern death. How and why is she doing this? To what end? What does the acid test tell us about viewers of sleepers in early modern literature itself? Will Peter and Harriet ever get together?? Tune in for the next installment...

Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 39: Saturday Sonnet

There's nothing like starting your weekend with a big breakfast and a piping hot sonnet. This week, we have Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella #39 ("Come sleep.") Enjoy!

Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw:
O make in me these civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, softest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.

Welcome!

Hi! I'm Nancy, and I'm a PhD candidate in Early Modern English literature at UW-Madison. I'm currently writing a dissertation about watching people sleep. (It sounds a little weird, until you realize how often sleep comes up in Renaissance Literature--in Macbeth alone, Duncan gets murdered in his sleep, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, and Macbeth goes a little nuts from sleep deprivation.) By doing my research, I'm learning that community contexts are vital: community members protect vulnerable sleepers from nasty things like murder (well--unless you're Duncan, that is), and they cultivate an ethos of caring for other human beings in the process. Because my research is so community-focused, I thought it would be a logical step to join the larger online community of people conducting research in the early modern period, to find out about the latest exciting developments and learn more about  digital approaches to humanities work. I'm looking forward to getting started!