Eat, Sleep, Lust, Repeat: Bedtime Routine, Health and Herbals in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT

Getting a good night’s sleep was of great importance to early modern people because it was central to healthy routine and the practice of piety. Re-examining printed regimens and herbals reveals that lust was thought to interrupt slumber and that managing sexual impulse and activity is a hitherto unexplored aspect of sleep care. Aspects of routine had to be repeated moderately and in succession in order to prevent disease and imbalance. Feeling sleepy and feeling lustful were, this article finds, connected in complicated and often conflicting ways in bedtime routine. Printed herbals and domestic recipe books shows that soporific materials were also useful in lessening lust. Such findings point to a shared culture of herbal knowledge that centred around bedtime and beds. Early modern people grappled with social, practical, moral and medical concerns when deciding how and when to use their beds, revealing the ways in which sleep care, sexuality and the pursuit of a healthy body and soul intersected.

KEYWORDS:

• Sleep
• medicine
• health
• sexuality
• early modern

One evening in 1619 the staunchly puritan wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington (1598–1658) was agitated and alone in his father’s workshop. He was searching for some ratsbane to end his life when his father’s maid, Lydia, entered the workshop and interrupted him. Wallington suddenly found himself ‘so full of lust’ for Lydia and became convinced that she was the devil incarnated into the ‘likenesse of some maid or butifull woman’. She cajoled him to go to bed, hoping that sleep might relieve his disturbed state – later that night, Lydia and his sister, Dorcas, had to prise a sword from beside his sleeping form. Eventually, Wallington found the ratsbane, swallowed it, and he lay on his ‘beede to sleepe thinking neaver to awake againe in this life’. Only sleep did not come and he vomited the poison, in turn, saving his life.¹ Wallington’s ‘A Record of Marcies of God’ detailed his tortured relationship with faith, his mind and body. Lust was one of several sins that he had been plagued with since he was only eight-years-old and one that he took active measures to manage. In the hopes of quenching his ‘burning desire’, he overhauled his daily routine, in a way that regimen writers of the period would have approved of. He avoided eggs, oysters and wine, foods that he had previously enjoyed and were considered aphrodisiacs. He strove for ‘temperance in my meate [food] drinke and pleasure’. He designated certain days as fasting days and started rising earlier in the morning. All of this was to stop himself from committing what he called ‘folly’ with ‘the party’ (Lydia).²

Nehemiah’s efforts to contain his lust are an insight into how early modern people understood the relationship between bodily, emotional and sexual health and how the experience of sleep and desire were intertwined with other kinds of daily choices. The six non-naturals – that is the six external factors thought to determine health consisting of air, food and drink, rest and exercise, sleep and waking, excretion and retentions and the emotions – were the corner stone of medical writing and recommendations of how to stay healthy in the period. Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey have shown that non-naturals were central in professional and lay medical practice. The repetitive practice of these activities profoundly influenced one another, as seen in Nehemiah’s use of sleep to temper his lust. Desire in early modern medical texts and sexual activity were considered either as a non-natural on its own or as a form of excretion and intertwined with the emotions too. But it was not just lust that might be tamed by lying in bed and sleeping; Nehemiah regularly took to his bed ‘and lay a while’ when angry.³ At other times, he sought to change his diet in order to ward against drowsiness, like when he noted that he had started eating pepper, ginger and cloves before sermons so he did not fall asleep at Church.⁴ Nehemiah’s recollections about managing rest and wakefulness reveal that discipline and routine were important religious and medical values in the early modern period that informed and conditioned people’s experiences of everyday life. Overhauling his diet hints at the ways that people might also use plants, animals and other materials to condition the non-naturals, a suggestion that is supported by printed herbals and domestic recipe books of the period.

Whilst previous studies have tended to single out a particular aspect of routine, by considering understandings and practice of sleep and sex together, this article shows the ways in which the non-naturals were managed in a more collective and continuous sense, as well as the practical difficulties this posed. Sleep and sex were linked in complex ways. From the outset they were meant to happen in the same space: beds. Added to this they were often described in medical texts as humorally opposite states and as having to be practiced in relation to each other: ensuring one had just woken before having sex, or making sure to rest after the exertion of lovemaking. Literature on nocturnal emissions raised the possibility that one could very well be aroused and excrete through ejaculation whilst sound asleep. Not rising early and jumping out of bed straightaway was also described in regimens as often causing bodily and emotional imbalance that fostered immoderate desire. In this way sleeping and lusting were culturally, intellectually and practically linked in this period in ways that were thought to be particularly pressing in the quest for a healthy body and healthy mind.

English people had a particularly fraught relationship with the corporeality of sex in this period,⁵ yet another reason why it makes a productive bedfellow with sleep for examining the entanglement of health care and social and cultural practices. This was because English reformers promoted marriage and sexual union as a route to salvation and pious living, in contrast to celibacy, and thus sexual union was an especially important factor in living a pious life. Parishioners in early modern England would regularly have heard in sermons how the impulse to have sex was sent by God to cajole his subjects into marriage and the perpetuation of the Church through procreation. And yet, once one’s ‘marital debt’ had been paid, excessive expression of sexuality was deemed deplorable, sinful and potentially deleterious to one’s health and future fertility. Early modern people, we have learnt from historians of medicine were, despite these tensions, keen to remedy infertility by consuming things that might increase desire. Jennifer Evans frames the ingredients and recipes that were designated as increasing fertility ‘aphrodisiacs’.⁶ Developing this idea, this article finds that recipe books and medical print also contained anti-aphrodisiacs that dampened libido and in doing so also lulled people to sleep.

Like sex, sleep was also something that medical and moral writers were adamant had to be managed, as the rich literature on sleep care has pointed to. Sasha Handley notes that ‘It was revered above all else for its unique capacity to safeguard the vitality and virtue of the body and soul’ and good sleep was ‘actively pursued within early modern households on a daily basis’.⁷ Similarly, Elizabeth K Hunter finds substantial evidence of the use of highly potent and potentially dangerous soporifics in early modern English recipe books.⁸ Sleep care or sleep medicine then encompassed the use of regimen and herbal expertise in order to procure a good night’s sleep. Handley and others have also drawn our attention to the host of other things that happened in beds and chambers other than sleep. Beds, we have learnt, were sociable spaces in early modern England. It was where babies were born, where one might hold court and receive visitors while unwell or dying. People were encouraged to pray in or just next to bed, and sleeping patterns were important in embodied devotion and spiritual practice.⁹ Non-marital bed-sharing was common and beds could be decidedly public spaces, where people gathered, cooked and entertained. They were also intimate spaces symbolising and formalising marriage vows: when couples separated they split from ‘bed and board’ and people frequently left bed linen to family members in their will, showing the ways in which beds and bedding were part of the affective artefacts that people kept in their home.¹⁰ There was considerable effort, time and energy put into the material experience of being in bed.¹¹ Being ‘bedfellows’ either romantically or platonically indicated a certain kinship and familiarity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English parlance.¹² Materially, spiritually and practically beds were intrinsic to the creation and continuance of the household.¹³ But whilst this literature has both stressed the importance of sleep and the emotional and social significance of these spaces, lust which was frequently described by medical writers as preventing a good night’s sleep, has hitherto been rather muted in this scholarship. This article supports the view that beds were decidedly medical spaces, and that this care extended to reducing lust in the quest to sleep well, whilst pointing out the tensions between prescription and practice.

Sleeping well and lusting moderately

Moderation was king in early modern English regimens: it had structured medical advice since antiquity and, importantly, intersected with early modern moral and religious ideals.¹⁴ Thomas Phaer (1510–1560), the English lawyer and physician, described how the fourth cause of pestilence after divine will, the stars and air, was the abuse of ‘Thynges not natural’. Indulging in too much food, drink, idleness, sleep and sex, or staying awake too much, or allowing ‘passions’ or emotions to overcome the mind, were the chief causes of ‘all such diseases as rayne amonge us now adayes’.¹⁵ Beds were particularly fraught spaces in the creation of healthy regimes. Sleeping moderately ‘strengtheneth’ and ‘comforteth’ the spirits of the body and ‘quyeteth’ the humours. Vaughan described how sleep would remove heat from the liver and ‘taketh away sorrow, and asswageth furie of the minde’.¹⁶ Slumber helped digestion, ‘recreateth the mind, repaireth the spirits, comforteth and refresheth the whole body’ the Bath physician Tobias Venner (1577–1660) described. During sleep ‘the animall faculty is at rest’ and the ‘regresse of the heat into the inner parts’ meant that the ‘best concoction is made in sleepe’.¹⁷ Making sure to fashion the room one slept in to be most conducive to rest was a common concern of regimen authors. Leaving the windows open, turning one’s body left to right throughout the night, never sleeping on one’s belly and lighting a fire in the morning to ‘consume all euyll vapours’ from the night, were all activities that helped early modern people to moderate their selves, homes and families.¹⁸

But if lying in bed was good and healthful during normal resting hours, it was perceived as highly detrimental outside of this allotted time by regimen authors. Venner warned readers that taking a daytime nap would cause ‘heavinesse of the head, dulnesse of wit, distillations, defluxions of humours, lethargies’. It would relax the ‘sinews’ of the brain and make the napper vulnerable to a host of ‘cold diseases … and palsies’.¹⁹ Although such advice might seem both excessively rigid and generic, these regimes were also imagined to be deeply personal and determined by humoral disposition, or one’s complexion. William Vaughan (1575–1641), an Oxford-educated lawyer, for example, thought that those with a sanguine and choleric complexion ought to sleep for seven hours and phlegmatic and melancholic people for nine hours.²⁰ And it was not just complexion that had to be considered when creating a healthy routine, but other things like whether one was convalescing from illness, ²¹ or whether pestilence was particularly rife,²² in determining the healthiest number of hours to sleep. For example, when plague was raging, Vaughan recommended keeping to bed ‘with some light, or to sit in the chamber by some sweet fire’ before eventually rising. ²³ Newborn babies were also allowed to rest for as long as they wanted. When they graduated out of this very vulnerable stage, however, childbearing guides and the authors of regimens stressed babies and toddlers too ought not to sleep indiscriminately.²⁴

Through these recommendations, regimen authors visualised, or perhaps hoped, that readers would see their beds as a tool in the rhythmic practice of healthful routines and preventative medicine. Before taking to bed people were encouraged to take into consideration age, illness, epidemics and disposition. Regimens addressed an imagined readership of lay people – Richard Brooke’s Uigeine hoped his guide to ‘preserving Health’ would furnish ‘every man with a Manuall, that may always ready at hand’ so that ‘every man’ could also be their own physician.²⁵ And yet, such advice posed no doubt a considerable practical challenge to implement. These readers were literate, although as heads of households they also had an obligation to direct the sleep routines of their servants. In this way, these idealised lifestyles must have been out of reach for many owing to work schedules, childcare, and as Handley has noted sociability.²⁶ When the lawyer Justinian Paget felt guilty about having risen too late – at nine o’clock – on a Saturday morning in November 1633, he decided he would start rising at five o’clock instead. He hoped he would wake on his own and then lying in bed ‘knock wth my bedstaff’ to wake his servant, Elias, who would then make a fire to ease his rising. He would then ‘presently skip out of my bed’. This resolution, Alec Ryrie notes, only lasted three weeks.²⁷ Not only does Paget’s foray into rising earlier reveal the challenges of fulfilling the expectations posed to those wealthy and, to use the early modern term, ‘idle’ enough to even be able adopt them, but also the host of other characters that had to be enlisted as participants in these routines. Regimens were hugely popular medical texts and also touted themselves as containing advice that was affordable and feasible for a cross section of society.²⁸ And yet, as Jennifer Richards has suggested, their importance may not have always lain in the faithful and dogged following of their guidance, but, drawing on developments that have expanded our understanding of the uses books were put to in the early modern period, to encourage rumination and ordering the mind as well as the body.²⁹

Although the principles of moderation infused almost every aspect of the search for a healthy body and pious soul in early modern England, the specific aspects of these routines, we begin to see, were often hard to put into practice even for elite people. Particularly difficult, and crucial to this article, was the way in which non-natural factors were connected in cascading and conflicting ways. This was particularly apparent around bedtime routine. The Haven of Health written by Thomas Cogan (1545?−1607), a physician and clergyman from Somerset, for example, recommended sleeping after eating and waking ‘softly’ for an hour or two after supper to help the process of digestion before lying down in bed.³⁰ Indeed, it was not enough to pay attention to an individual determinant, but they ought to be carried out in an ordered and sequential way: people should move, eat, drink, sleep and then engage in ‘venery’ (sexual activity).³¹ Andrew Boorde (1490–1549) was similarly concerned about managing the proximity of eating and sleeping and insisted that ‘veneryous actes’, should only take place after sleeping ‘for it doth ingendre the crampe, the gowte, and other displeasures’. Sleep was closely tied to the emotions and would be disrupted when one was angry or grieving. Particularly important was that when one went ‘bedwarde’ one should be ‘me[r]ry’ and ‘haue mer[r]y company aboute you’ to prevent disquiet and ill health. The passions of the soul had a big bearing on how restful the sleep would be or how long one should sleep for.³² Childbearing guides of the period stressed that being ‘cheerful’ was also important when taking to bed to ensure the conception of healthy children.³³ It would be foolish, therefore, as Thomas Cogan schooled, to concentrate on one aspect of health in isolation: ‘For exercise is to be used in an wholesome ayre, and affections of the mind do commonly follow the temperature of the body which is chiefly preserved by the moderate use of those five things’.³⁴ Exertion or exercise was often necessary before a period of rest, and the concoction of food and drink took place during slumber too. During this period of rest, the body’s heat was drawn to its core and intensified, warming the stomach and liver. This was often described as being like the flames beneath a cooking pot which concocted food and drink into fat and energy.³⁵ This was the reason that consuming or applying things that cooled the body before bed was conducive to good sleep because it drew blood and humours to the stomach to start the process of concoction.

It was not just sleep that was intertwined with the practice of eating, drinking, moving, emoting, excreting and the air. Sex or feeling aroused and its resolution sat awkwardly between excretion, exercise and the passions of the soul. Cogan explained this network of effects and influences in describing how (marital) sex ‘procureth appetite’ and ‘helpeth concoction’ which in turn made the body ‘more light and nimble’. Ejaculation was a form of excretion that ‘openeth the pores and conduits’. Having sex in moderation would ‘driveth away sadnesse, madnesse, anger, melancholy and fury’. Ejaculating might help too in moderating lust particularly in preventing ‘unchast dreams’ which would lead to nocturnal emissions.³⁶ But it could be deleterious to health to be too abstinent: Medicina Statica (1676) warned that forcing chasteness might ‘obstruct perspiration’ and lead to an excess of cold and moisture in the body.³⁷ Having sex on a regular but infrequent basis might be particularly important for those who had a phlegmatic constitution and were ‘troubled with the rheumes’ as it promoted excretion.³⁸ Desire in regimens was, like sleep, described as much of a bodily reaction to one’s routine as it was a response to beholding a person that provoked arousal. It was thus part and parcel of this healthful bedtime routine, although while sleep was improved by cold moist things, lust was dampened by it.

Eating rich foods and drinking too much, both of which produced heat, were common causes of immoderate arousal. Nicholas Venette’s (1633–1698) bestselling Conjugal Love, a survey of ancient and contemporary views on sex, generation and love, originally written in French in 1671 and translated into many languages in the early eighteenth century, connected indulgence in food, drink and merriment with excessive lust and desire. He detailed how daily life and ‘good Victuals, and excellent Wine’ often spurred young men’s ‘Sensualities’ or ‘Lasciviousness’ on. ‘Juicy Aliments’, ‘Delicious Drinks’, ‘making always good chear’ and having a fully ‘Belly’ meant that men’s penises that were not far from the stomach were also ‘continually swoln’.³⁹ Idleness was also particularly dangerous. Take, for example, armies where Venette perceived many ‘amorous disorders’ were rife because soldiers spent long periods of time simply waiting or training for war. The weather also contributed to how lustful a person was. Venette thought men were more chaste in Stockholm because it was cold, whilst the fact there were more monstrous births in Seville and Naples – monstrous births were thought to be caused by excessively amorous sex – was evidence that hotter temperatures roused libido.⁴⁰ The impulse to have sex was embedded within the oscillation of non-natural factors, and in particular, the need to rid oneself of excrements. Hair was represented as a product of excretion and thus one philosopher described ‘Men that are very hairy are most amorous’.⁴¹ Men who had a leg amputated would be more lustful as there would be more blood pooling in their penis.⁴² Lovesickness or erotic melancholy was a condition accompanied by bodily dissolution as well as cognitive impairment.⁴³ All this is evidence that sexual desire was placed in relation to general bodily wellbeing and domestic medical routine. In this way, beds, at least in the ways that regimen authors imagined them were profoundly medical spaces, albeit ones that were troublingly tied to the emotions and morality.

Like sleep, medical authors also warned that one ought to take stock of a variety of factors before having sex. Of particular importance was the season. For men, summer was a dangerous time of year to have sex because the heat of the season exacerbated their naturally hot complexion, Venette argued. The exertion of lovemaking in men ‘destroys that natural heat, dissipates the Spirits, and weakens the parts’. It might also produce choler and other sharp excrements which would render a man ‘feeble and languishing’. Even if a man could muster up the interest to have sex in summer, he might very suddenly lose his ‘strength’ and thereafter be beset with ‘weakness and extraordinary faintings’. The stakes were high. Venette warned his (assumed) male readers that having too much sex in the heat of summer would not just cause ‘Distempers’ but could spell death. Women, in contrast, were revived by the heat of summer because they were colder and moister than men and therefore would be much more likely to be full of lust in summer. Their ‘Passages more open, the Humours more agitated, and the Imagination more moved’ in summer. For Venette, this was a lesson: ‘Nature’ was expertly showing that ‘excess of Love is absolutely contrary to the Health of Men’ by making men and women desirous of sex at different times of year.⁴⁴ From December to March, Thomas Elyot (c. 1496–1546) instructed male readers to ‘vse liberally the companye of a woman’, whereas in the warmer months, one ought to either ‘forbeare carnall company’ completely or at least ‘vse it moderately’.⁴⁵ Medical authors often commented that having sex was considered more dangerous for men than women because when men ejaculated they experienced a great ‘dissipation of the Spirits, and natural heat’ whereas women would merely be fatigued by the ‘Motions of Love’ but lost no ‘Matter’. As a result, men might become seriously unwell or infertile if they had too much sex, whereas women could ‘do the trick’, or have sex, ‘at all times’.⁴⁶ Vaughan concurred that it was best to ‘vse carnall copulation in Winter, and in Spring time’ and only when one was lustful. For him it was imperative to go to ‘sleepe immediately after it’ which would help the restoration of spirits. ⁴⁷ Levinus Lemnius suggested that one should exercise, then eat, ‘after meat use venery’ and after sex, go to sleep. This would ensure the ‘wearinesse that came by venery is abated by sleep, which also helps concoction’.⁴⁸ Having sex when someone was still recovering from disease could be fatal, Boorde warned.⁴⁹ Everard Maynwaringe (1628–1699) described how ‘Seasonable and moderate Venus, alleviates Nature, and helps digestion’ but too much ‘debilitates the faculties, hastens old Age’.⁵⁰ In another treatise, he warned that ejaculating too frequently could bring on a consumption that would render men ‘pale, brown, and sad’ in countenance.⁵¹

Sex and sleep, confusingly often directly competed with each other, in that they were both meant to take place at bedtime. Venette was particularly taken with the marital routine of ‘Tradesmen’ who supposedly had ‘well-shaped and robust Children’. These men reportedly had sex immediately upon waking, meaning their spirits and natural heat were fortified by sleep, their stomach moderately empty, digestion completed and they were yet to be spent by a full day of labour. This had the additional benefit of preventing men from abandoning ‘themselves to the violence of their Passion’ if they left lovemaking until the evening before sleep. Venette was especially enamoured of a post-coital ‘little Nap’ before one ‘rises and goeth about his ordinary Concerns’, whilst wives continued to lie in bed to ‘preserve the precious charge he has entrusted her withal’.⁵² Sarah Jinner (fl. 1658–1664), an almanac writer, joked that when men ‘came sober home, and got to bed by day-light’ they would have the energy and health to wake in the middle of the night and be ‘merry at Candle-light’ leading to more frequent childbearing.⁵³ Although authors debated the precise time to have sex rather than sleep in beds, we can see that both were part of an expected and idealised bedtime routine for the elite readers of regimens. Sleep, sex alongside other factors like eating and moving, were described as been rhythmically and repetitively engaged in to create the ideal body and mind.

The dangers of immoderate sexual appetite or practice were stark in medical texts. Venereal disease was directly linked to the inability to ‘restrain our too wanton Lusts’, Charles Peter (fl. 1670–1695) warned.⁵⁴ Historians have similarly noted that venereal disease was commonly attributed to ‘illicit, frequent, fervent’ sex rather than simply infection.⁵⁵ But being full of lust was also linked to poor procreative outcomes too. Aristoteles Master-piece (1684) recommended newly married couples who wished to have a baby to ‘copulate at a distance of time, not too often not yet too seldom’.⁵⁶ Likewise Jakob Ruff (1500–1558), a German medical author described a monstrous child that was born with two heads, four arms and one torso in an Oxfordshire village in 1552 that was the direct result of ‘the immoderate desire of lust’ causing the ‘seeds of men and women…to be very feeble and imperfect, whereby of necessity a feeble and imperfect Feature must ensure’.⁵⁷ In 1691, the Athenian Mercury, a very early London advice column printed the question ‘Why are Common’, or promiscuous, ‘Women seldom or never with Child?’ It was because these women had too much sex rendering their wombs slippery and unfit and akin to a well-trodden garden path that was not fruitful.⁵⁸ In a treatise on venereal pox, Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), blamed women working in brothels in Rome and Naples as the origin of venereal disease. By having sex with too many different men, their wombs had become breeding grounds for ‘an acid and nidorous crudity’ that they then transmitted to clients and spread the disease. Daniel Sennert compared this to the ‘excrements’ that might come from eating too many different foods. Having only one man’s seed in her womb infrequently was ‘familier and wholesome’ and the only way to conceive.⁵⁹ The midwife Jane Sharp (c. 1641–1671) similarly asked women to consider before they had sex whether or not their womb was clean or they were too lusty. Exercising too much, sleeping too long or eating too much might all rouse the spirits too much, cause desire, and she provided a remedy that was ‘cooling, thickning and binding’.⁶⁰ In this way, although marriage may have been advertised by religious reformers as an appropriate outlet for lust, the need to keep it in check and moderate sexual activity for a healthy mind and body was as, if not more, important for married individuals as it was for unmarried people hoping to stay sexually continent.

The regimens that medical authors set out asked readers to consider a vast constellation of factors when going to bed and deciding whether they would have sex and how long they might sleep. These were emotional – how consumed with grief or happiness had one been during the day? – and bodily – what had one eaten or how had one exerted oneself? Even one’s bedding ought to be considered: Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) for example warned people against sleeping on ‘hot soft Feather-beds’ which would prevent sleep and excite ‘Venus’ or lust instead.⁶¹ Added to this they often contained a list of common foodstuffs and other plants with their effects on the body (something that as we shall see was developed in the herbal genre), that also had to be noticed and manipulated carefully. Sleep and sexual activity were connected spatially and temporally: they were both meant to happen in bed and during the hours one was expected to be in bed. But they were also connected in more complicated bodily and emotional ways: sleep prevented or warded against lustful thoughts and immoderate sexual practice, but sexual release might also facilitate quiet, peaceful sleep. In this way, although they were positioned as opposite states by regimen authors in in humoralism more generally, they were bound together in practice and in understanding. As we shall see, this dichotomy becomes more pronounced when we consider that ingredients and processes that were labelled as soporific were simultaneously useful in reducing lust. Although regimen authors imagined that through mindful and watchful consideration of the balance of non-naturals, one might be able to live healthily through routine rather than medicine, these cooling ingredients, I suggest, offered a complementary tool in procuring sleep and the creation of a healthy and pious schedule. Perhaps most difficult of all was that, except for recommendations about the seasonality of sex, regimen writers rarely thought about the fact that beds were not always occupied alone. For them, this space was one in which one could single-handedly author a perfect body and a perfect soul. We know from elsewhere that beds and chambers were sociable spaces and that bedsharing with non-marital partners was also common.⁶² It is in this context that herbal knowledge of soporifics and what we might call anti-aphrodisiac might have seemed particularly valuable.

Cool, bind and restrain

Yet another genre of medical text was becoming increasingly prevalent in the seventeenth century: the herbal, or as it was increasingly called, pharmacopeia or dispensatory. These books which consisted of lists of the properties and qualities of plants and other matierals for medicinal use, had their origins in Aristotle and other ancient authors’ botanical work, but combined local or folkloric understandings of the natural world too. Following in the footsteps of Galen, early modern herbals were concerned to classify ingredients in terms of their action on the body – whether they increased or decreased heat, dried out the body or made it moister – and how potent was the impact ranging from mild in the first degree to considerable in the fourth degree. Although herbals as texts were not accessible for all early modern people owing to cost and literacy levels, some like John Gerard’s (1545–1637) The Herball and William Turner’s (1509–1568) two-volume Herball were popular enough to be regularly copied out into literate individuals’ commonplace or recipe books.⁶³ Such texts have been represented as being committed to the ‘standardisation of remedies’ and were increasingly over the seventeenth century sanctioned by the authority of a monarch or state. The information contained within herbals subtly changed over time and the genre as a whole diverged from being primarily medical in focus and directed towards household practice, to being primarily interested in botanical classification. Thus, Richard Brathwaite (1588–1673), a religious authority and conduct guide author, thought that the ideal English housewife would regularly ‘peruseth’ herbals as part of her ‘houshold affaires’.⁶⁴ In this way, although herbals offered a kind of cure for imbalances that might be caused by deficiencies in one’s healthful routine, they were wholly integrated within broader ideas about health-related labour within the household. The everydayness of some of the ingredients listed in herbals meant that they might be easily integrated into meals. Take, for example, the humble garden parsnip which John Pechey (1655–1716) described as being ‘nourishing, and palatable’, helping to open and cleanse the body and as being a ‘Provocative to Venery’, and thereby useful in increasing fertility.⁶⁵

Within these texts, plants that helped to procure sleep were frequently mentioned, and were commonly cold and moist. The earliest English printed herbal published in 1525 by Richard Banckes described how lettuce leaves and seeds were ‘colde and sumwhat moyste’ and along with aiding in the cure of distempers caused by heat, when applied with breastmilk to the temples would make the taker ‘slepe well’.⁶⁶ Amongst recipes for purges, abating fever, killing worms, encouraging urination and comforting the stomach and liver, Banckes’ herbal also had remedies that decreased lust. Agnus castus, that grew in dry woods, supposedly ‘wyl kepe men & women chast’ by destroying the moisture of ‘manes sede’: it was hot and dry in the second degree.⁶⁷ The grete herball published only a year later also touted agnus castus as a cure against excessive lechery (also described as hot and dry), and lettuce (cold and wet) as good for sleep. To ‘preserue the mynde’ bugloss and lettuce could be used together to temper heat and ‘profyteth against lechery’ – here again we see the theme of a moderate and cheerful demeanour with a healthy expression of desire.⁶⁸ Although agnus castus was described as being hot and dry in these earlier herbals, as the genre developed, it was increasingly classified as a cold ingredient. At the same time, authors also developed the link between these cold plants and their ability to simultaneously quell lust and encourage sleep, and in doing so, contributed to the prevailing idea that like Nehemiah Wallington hoped in the example that began this chapter, one might be able to sleep off lecherous thoughts. The 1543 A New Herball of Macer, for example, described how agnus castus would ‘destroyeth the fowle lust of lechery’ if it was drunk but also by going to sleep with it under one’s pillow or mattress, men might also control immoderate desire for sex.⁶⁹ In this way, although regimens and herbals shared a belief that feeling sleepy and feeling aroused were physically and emotionally opposite states, herbals offered a solution to the problem that went beyond simply complying with a moderate regimen.

Poppies, lettuce, violets, rose, henbane, camphor and nightshade were consistently described in herbals across the period as having soporific qualities. Water lilies too, were often listed as, in John Gerard’s (1545–1612) terms, ‘causing sweate [sweet] and quiet sleepe’.⁷⁰ Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) Sylva sylvarum told readers that in order to ‘procure quiet sleep’ one could use lettuce, syrup of roses, violets, lettuce, saffron, balm, apples and a soup of ‘Bread in Malmsey’ when going to bed. It worked because these ingredients were cold.⁷¹ William Coles’ (1626–1662) Adam in Eden recommended the ‘Leaves, Knops, and Seeds’ of poppies ‘stamped with Vinegar, Womans milk, and Saffron’ placed into the fundament as a clyster to bring on sleep, but it might also ease gout.⁷² Although the link between cold medicinal ingredients and sleep was entrenched, we can also glimpse other concerns hidden within the methods to procure sleep that hint at the complexity of early modern conceptions of wellness: was this recipe by Coles’ also assumed to be successful because it lessened pain and discomfort and thereby allowed the taker to slumber peacefully?

Crucially, these same soporific ingredients were also often listed in herbals as helping to rid the mind of lustful thoughts, and also at times, at preventing arousal. Lettuce, water lilies, camphor and violets, which were soporific, were also frequently described as cooling seed and thereby reducing lust. Philip Barrough (fl. 1590) in his 1583 The Methode of Physicke noted that the seeds of rue, lettuce and water lilies all helped to ‘extinguish and quench seede’ and would ‘restraine lecherie’ by cooling the body. Those who ate a lot of calamint, a bush herb that commonly grows in English gardens, ‘doe loose the power of generation’, or erection. This was the case for the seeds of white violets too.⁷³ Gerard described how the juice of lettuce ‘cooleth and quencheth the natural seed’ if consumed in large enough doses.⁷⁴ Coles suggested that applying lettuce with camphor directly to the testicles could ‘abateth the heat of Lust’ in men.⁷⁵ William Westmacott’s (fl. 1695) The Historia Vegetabilium outlined a decoction with the leaf, root or seed of water lilies would ‘cool, bind, and restrain’ and thus was ‘exceeding good for those who shall endeavour to preserve themselves from Lechery and uncleanness’. It stopped the ‘involuntary passage of Sperme in Sleepe’ and if used frequently enough might altogether ‘extinguisheth even the very Motions to venery’, entrenching a view that a peaceful sleep was dependent on not being troubled by amorous thoughts or motions. Placing lily pads on to the back would stop ‘running in the Reines, and the Whites, or any other flux in Man or Woman’, linked as we have seen with excessive desire. Boiling the leaves in red wine and drinking the concoction explicitly dowsed the flames of desire. Melons, Westmacott, noted were often used by Spaniards and Italians ‘to cool the boiling rage of Lust’.⁷⁶ In a hand-written pharmacopeia held in the Wellcome Library, duck weed, also called water lentils, mixed with lettuce seed, purslane, plantain seed, barley sugar and syrup of roses could be used to reduce the ‘virulent flux of the sperme after mannerfull remidies’.⁷⁷ Pechey (1655–1716) pointed readers of his Compleat Herbal towards dill seeds which ‘lesses Venery’.⁷⁸

As well as crossover between the botanical materials that brought on sleep and reduced lust, some herbals explicitly mentioned the fact that soporific and anti-aphrodisiac actions went hand-in-hand. Coles noted that an oil made with the flowers of water lilies ‘cureth the Head-ach, causeth sweet and quiet sleep, and putteth away all Venerous dreams, and taketh down the standing of the Yard’.⁷⁹ Dill, Pechey described, not only lessened lust, as we have heard, but also brought on sleep.⁸⁰ Notably poppies were frequently listed as reducing pain, cause sleep and lessening lust.⁸¹

The assumption that bringing on sleep might also help someone to live a more sexually continent life can also be observed in records of medical practice. Charles Peter described how he had treated a twenty-five-year-old man and a ‘young Lass about 19’ because they were seized with a violent fever and ‘great pains in the Back and Head’ because they had over the course of three days had an ‘excessive’ amount of sex. Peters prescribed diacodium, made from poppies, to ‘refrigerate the parts and cause sleep, in two or three days the Fever left them’.⁸² Sleep might help resolve the bodily causes of excess desire too. By taking to bed and resting, Venette in Conjugal Love thought that ‘superfluous Humours’ would be consumed overnight, especially excess seed, meaning the afflicted man would awake refreshed and with ‘nothing left to trouble us the next morning’.⁸³ This connection between good, peaceful sleep and restoring emotional and sexual equilibrium that medical writers drew on persisted throughout the period and took on new meaning in the eighteenth-century discourse about nocturnal pollution and the dangers of masturbation, as we shall see.

The handwritten compendia of recipes that many elite households compiled and kept in early modern England reveal that the ingredients and compounds that herbalists found their way into these collections, including those that brought on sleep and reduced lust. A recipe book owned by D Petre ‘To cause sleep’ involved boiling lettuce and nutmeg in a pint of milk, small ale and the syrup of cowslips ‘& drink it when you go to bed’.⁸⁴ Another for the same, was to be taken ‘in bed’.⁸⁵ Lettuce, violets and roses were particularly common ingredients in domestic recipe books to aid in slumber, like a remedy ‘To cause sleep’ in an anonymous seventeenth-century recipe book in the Folger Shakespeare Library containing boiled lettuce, violets, vinegar and nutmeg and placed to the temple.⁸⁶ An eighteenth-century almanac owned by the Tower family from Southweald advised that ‘The smell of Hops procure sleep’ and relayed how by placing a fabric ‘pocket’ filled with hops into Old Mrs Haten’s ‘Bed Chamber’ had brought on slumber.⁸⁷ As mentioned, the cessation or alleviation of pain or discomfort was also associated with aiding sleep. Sleep remedies almost invariably centred on cooling the body, and therefore getting someone to rest was a comfortable bed-fellow with quenching fever.⁸⁸ A recipe book compiled by Richard Perssehouse contained a remedy ‘for the payne in the head & to make one sleepe’ which involved taking nightshade pulverising it and then applying it ‘all over your forhead & temples’ cold.⁸⁹

In other instances, recipe books contained instructions on how to make multi-purpose syrups, decoctions or cordials that were often used to bring on sleep but had a variety of other medicinal uses too. These may very well have also been used as soporifics and to reduce libido, although it is not explicitly mentioned. ‘Syrup of poppies’ is a good example of this that was often an ingredient in soporific compounds, but might also simply be used as a flavour enhancer in foods. An anonymous recipe book, for example, described how one could make a ‘Syrup of poppies’ to be kept for use whenever needed.⁹⁰ Hester Denbigh’s recipe book similarly contained instructions on how to make poppy water with poppies, rosewater, brandy, raisins, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg which could be steeped for eight nights ‘then put them into bottles to keep’.⁹¹ Receipts like that to ‘cleanse the blood and coole the liuer’ might have had application for those struggling to get a good night’s rest, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in the recipe itself.⁹² Gertrude Holcroft’s receipt book contained a ‘Cooling Purge’ which helped to ‘comfort the stomack & expel urine’ which may also have helped to lull someone to sleep.⁹³ Roses were often ingredients in soporific remedies but also frequently used in recipes like the one in D Petre’s book for a ‘perfume to burn’ in which cedar, cloves, musk and civet were wrapped in rose leaves and then placed on the fire to produce a pleasant odour, and make the air in rooms clean and sweet suitable for sleep.⁹⁴

In Thomas Sheppey’s recipe book, he copied out a passage on water lilies from Westmacott’s The Historia Vegetabilium that they could ‘cool bind and restrain’ fluxes including the ‘passing away of the seed when one is asleep’. This, Sheppey thought, might help to cure ‘the pox’ which he clearly understood as related or caused by immoderate lust. Using water lilies too frequently could even completely ‘extinguish’ desire. Sheppey also noted that purslain seed would cool ‘outragious lust of the body, venerious Dreams and the like’ as well as cooling ‘heat and sharpness of Urine’. This too could in large doses prevent men and women from being able to have sex and procreate. In Sheppey’s book another two common soporific ingredients could also lessen ‘immoderate venery’: red roses and camphor.⁹⁵ A recipe for ‘Valerian Water’ that would ordinarily ‘giueth great will to meddle wth women’ if used too often would lead a man to be ‘nigh dry’ and unable to have sex.⁹⁶ Similarly, Jane Jackson’s recipe ‘To kill the heate within a man’ where red wine and ‘good milke’ was to be drunk every morning fasting and ‘at night last when hee goeth to bed’, points not only to the potential commonplace tactic of trying to reduce lust for greater health, but also the prominence of going to bed as an activity in domestic medical practice.⁹⁷ A remedy ‘for the heat of ye back’ in an unknown Scottish family’s recipe book instructed the party to sew lily pads together and place them on the back that is taken almost verbatim from Gerard’s Herbal, points to a domestic interest in reducing lust, and the ways in which desire, alongside fever and pain were understood to commonly disrupt slumber and healthy bedtime routine.⁹⁸ A recipe in an unknown early-eighteenth-century recipe book in the Royal College of Physicians describes how if one carried around the seed of sorrel, commonly designated in herbals as cold and dry, which had been gathered by a boy that was a virgin, then one’s sperm ‘shall not goe from him, neither sleeping nor waking’ and was particularly useful in pollution in the night.⁹⁹ It also listed two recipes to procure sleep including one with the juices of henbane, lettuce, plantain, poppy, mandrake, ivy, mulberry and hemlock mixed together. Dipping a sponge into the mixture, leaving it in the sun and then laying the sponge to the patient’s rose ‘would haue sleep, & he will sleep quickly’ so much so one might have to actively wake the person with vinegar. It was ‘excellent and true’.¹⁰⁰ Domestic recipe books then display both the emphasis on repetition of eating, moving, excretion, sleeping and lusting as the route to health, as well as the ways in which herbal expertise might be put to use to help live up to these ideas. They similarly reveal the way in which the non-naturals could simultaneously be medical tools to be manipulated, and also symptoms of good or poor health that were connected to each other in complicated and sometimes unmanageable ways. Although reducing lust was of concern enough to make its way into domestic recipe books, it is difficult without more context to know whether these were included primarily to aid in sleep, as a way to manage pre-, marital or extra-marital sexual urges or to ensure male and female seed was healthy enough for conception, or whether it really makes sense at all to separate out these medical goals.

Nehemiah Wallington was not alone in fretting about the moral and physical consequences of his lust. Other early modern men also expressed anxiety about their amorous inclinations in their diaries and their wish to temper them. Many of them, like Wallington, were of the hotter sort of Protestant. Other early modern men seemed aware that feeling desirous might have medically significant impacts on their health, and sleep, but were mostly unbothered. Cotton Mather, the New England puritan, noted in his diary in 1682 that in his youth he had ‘sinned horribly, and by my early wickedness and filthiness I have provoked thee’, hinting at masturbation or lustful thoughts. Two years later he was again tempted by ‘unclean thoughts’ which he sought to quash, although the specific mechanism is not listed.¹⁰¹ Other diarists, however, seemed to show little interest in dampening their desires. William Drummond, the son of the Scottish poet also called William Drummond, recorded in his diary when he masturbated or was ‘fatal’ or ‘solitarie’ with little consternation. On 15 October 1657, for example, he ‘cam[e] from the town: fatall in my chamber at hom[e]’ or on 7 August the same year ‘I was entertained with my wonted solitarines’.¹⁰² Samuel Pepys, a naval officer and diarist, frequently documented his masturbatory activities and when he had sexual dalliances with women who were not his wife, Elizabeth. In Mary 1665/6 he noted that he had not ‘quite conquered’ his ‘nature’ and continued to ‘esteem pleasure above all things’. He could not give up ‘musique and women’. A day later he reflected more soberly that ‘The truth is, I do indulge myself a little more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world, do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate’. He worried by the time he had the professional stability to indulge without concern, he would no longer be able to physically do so.¹⁰³ Even a man given to indulging in all manner of delights such as Pepys was aware that lust and his indiscretions might have a poor impact on his body and soul.

The presence of soporifics and anti-aphrodisiac plants in printed herbals and in domestic recipe books hints at the importance of moderating sleep and sex in relation to one another. Although the ideal was that one lived such a balanced and careful life in order to not need external medical intervention in the form of herbal concoctions, herbals offered the expertise and tools to facilitate humoral balance, and it is here that we begin to get a sense of how the social, familial and medical uses of beds overlapped, and at times competed with each other. Take for example, a letter the Oxfordshire gentlewoman Anne Dormer (c. 1648–1695) wrote her sister in 1687 describing how for the past seven years she had been unable to sleep net to her cruel and abusive husband, Robert. The room was hot like an ‘oven’, especially in summer, and cluttered with her husband’s ‘trinketts’. To her it was a ‘hatefull den’ and her sleeplessness a fate ‘worss than Death’. Not only had she ‘lost’ her sleep but also her ‘health’. Quite clearly Anne and Robert had also lost the use of marital beds. Their domestic discordance and disagreement bled out into all aspects of Anne’s daily life.¹⁰⁴ Here we begin to see the ways in which domestic environments were not always healthful, nor was it possible to live out the repetitive routine regimen writers might have lauded, as well as the subtle ways in which the practice of sleep and sex were entangled in complex ways.

Nocturnal pollutions and masturbation

Although regimens and herbals both tended to stress that sleep and arousal were opposite humoral states, there was also concern in medical writing about whether sleep really could diminish lechery, or actually allowed one’s inner thoughts and impulses to run riot. In cheap, bawdy print feeling sleepy and feeling aroused were literary tools that on surface level suggests that sleep and sex were (humorously) often in competition for space and time in marital beds, and on a deeper level that being bedfellows in both senses was a fundamental part of early modern ideas of good marriage.

Thus the unnamed ‘lusty lass’ in the ballad, School of Venus opined that she ‘never shall quietly sleep,/till I have a stout Lad by my side’ and her desire made her toss and turn at night.¹⁰⁵ In the Mourning Conquest, the male lover tires of the sport of lovemaking and lies down ‘to rest awhile’ and has fits where he is rendered unconscious whilst his female lover tries to ‘keep his Youth from sleep’ by arousing him.¹⁰⁶ In A Favourite Love Song, the protagonist is kept awake in their bed at night with ‘thoughts of love’ so that he is ‘sore oppressed, could take no rest’.¹⁰⁷ Similarly in The Maids Complaint for Want of a Dil doul, the woman cannot stop ruminating on ‘strange fancies’ while she is trying to sleep which interrupts her ‘rest’. This is eventually resolved by the use of a ‘dil doul’, or dildo, and she is finally able to sleep.¹⁰⁸ In My Husband has no Courage the wife looks forward to going to bed ‘thinking to get some Venus sporting’ or sex. ‘No sleep at all goes in my head,/my Husband lyes by me a Snoring’.¹⁰⁹ She tries to cajole him into having sex by waking him and rubbing his shins as well as plying him with foods that increase heat like eringo roots, eggs, oyster pies and marrow bones. Again, in the Discontented Bride, a new wife tosses and turns in bed, lying ‘whining, perplexing and vexing’ next to him for want of sex. He meanwhile is swaddled in a blanket. She attempts to hide the blanket only for him to find it and return to his peaceful slumber – ‘he little regarded her moan,/But snoring lay like a drowsie,/Wrapt up in his Blanket as tight as a pack,/And never consider’d what she did lack’. At the end of the ballad she joyfully finds a lover and lets her husband have his ‘ease’, sleeping peacefully in ‘his Blanket’.¹¹⁰ Excess desire is represented in this satirical and titillating material as humorous, particularly common in women, and largely untroubling. Added to this we can observe a prominent theme of sleep and sex schedules as something that couples had to marry up when sharing a home and a bed.

These tensions in cheap print add further evidence to the claim of historians of sexuality that note its experience and practice were profoundly medical. Jennifer Evans has suggested that for ‘early modern men and women sex was “sexy” because it was reproductive’.¹¹¹ Other scholars have noted that sexual behaviours, sensations and phenomena did not constitute an autonomous category of knowledge but rather were related and mediated through other kinds of knowledge exacerbated by the fact that pornography borrowed or was indistinguishable from other genres of print like medical advice, drinking songs, political pamphlets or novels.¹¹² For Alan Bray, early modern sexuality lacked ‘the carefully labelled categories of a later period’ and having sex was ‘scarcely distinguished from other sensual pleasures, of eating or of getting drunk or dressing up, perhaps even of fighting or going to bed’.¹¹³ The ways in which lust and its expression or repression were embedded within the management of other non-naturals in the household is perhaps most beautifully summarised by Kate in the erotic pamphlet The School of Venus who when asked by Frank, an older woman, whether she could experience any pleasure whilst shut up with her mother in her chamber, responds: ‘Do you ask me what pleasure, truly Cousin, I take a great deal, I eat when I am hungry, I drink when I am dry, I sleep, sing and dance, and sometimes go into the Country and take the Air with my mother’. Frank assures her that sexual pleasure is greater than these indulgences but, importantly, the modern reader ought to attend to the fact that it is not so different to not be comparable to these things.¹¹⁴

But if cheap print represented feeling lustful and feeling sleepy as similar bodily experiences that had to be indulged in at different times, some authors in medical and philosophical print worried that this division was too neat. One of Aristotle’s central arguments, that early modern medical authors drew on, was that the body was passive during sleep and was therefore immobile. And yet, quite clearly some men could and did ejaculate in their sleep. As William Maclehose has noted, many twelfth- and thirteenth-century medical authors saw nocturnal emissions as a largely ‘inevitable’ product of an excess of seed and need for excretion, as well as the ‘impression’ that an encounter with an attractive person left. The waking thought might then produce a nocturnal emission of seed. The imagination acted as the essential link between one’s waking and sleeping state.¹¹⁵ For these medieval and, later, early modern medical writers, nocturnal emission was largely untroubling because it was substantially different from the humoral and emotional experience of being aroused and having sex while awake which would deplete one of necessary spirits and was more sinful.

But this view changed substantially in the latter half of the seventeenth century where nocturnal emission, rather than being the result of living a pious and chaste life, was a symptom of habitual masturbation, and was cause for concern. Eighteenth-century authors continued to worry that lust and desire might cause bodily disrepair. This is perhaps most famously apparent in the famous Onania or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution in 1714 and subsequent Supplement to Onania in 1725, both hugely popular, although as Michael Stolberg has qualified, ‘based on the long-standing tradition’ of stressing the physical problems associated with sexual activity and masturbation in particular.¹¹⁶ Both published supposed letters that had been written to the author by troubled young men who having started masturbating when they were young, then experienced pain, weakness, genital fluxes and consumption. A healthy sleep routine continued to be touted as a way to ward against the temptation of masturbation, but also a key symptom of the disorder that these teenage boys suffered from was disruption to their slumber. For example, one letter writer described how having been taught to masturbate by his brother when he was eight, he now suffered so much at night from bad humours that he was unable to sleep: ‘I must have my Head lay very high, for if I lay low, the Humour flies up into my head’. Another thirty-two-year-old man described how excessive lust and masturbation had now left his genitals so cold that he could not sleep ‘and becomes so lean’. He had tried taking ‘some fortifying Pills, and Rhenish Wine’ with herbs but to no avail.¹¹⁷ As the author of a pamphlets warning of the dangers of venereal disease noted, symptoms were much worse at night ‘at which time it most boldly walks its rounds to afflict poor Mortals’. This was because ‘all Pains are worse in the Night, than the Day, by reason that the exercising of the Body in the Day doth divert the Pain, but the Warmness of the Bed at Night doth stir up the Malignity’.¹¹⁸ These writers, unlike earlier regimen writers, thought that some of the physical problems brought about by immoderate lust and ejaculating excessively, would be lifelong. In Onania, all non-marital emission was seen as harmful to the body and soul including those that took place while one was asleep. But despite these shifts, the routine that the author of Onania recommended to young men to reduce their desire to masturbate would not have been unfamiliar to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century regimen authors: ‘a cooling diet’ mainly consisting of ‘dry Suppers’, although he did not share the optimism of earlier authors that such imbalances and impediments could be rectified through orderly repetition of eating, moving, excreting and sleeping. Like Wallington, these boys and men were to rise early: ‘The Bed is too great a Friend to this Sin’.¹¹⁹ Similarly, those ‘who are prone to Lust’ ought not to sleep on their back ‘for that heats the Reins, and causes irritations to Lust’.¹²⁰ Although the genre of regimens declined in the seventeenth century, it is clear that in eighteenth-century print, beds continued to be prominent medical sites in which healthy regimens were forged, lust fought against and slumber pursued.

Conclusion

It is noteworthy that much of the advice in medical print for reducing desire was addressed to men, including the eighteenth-century panic about masturbation. Added to this, if we recall, regimen writers often stressed that only having sex at certain times of day or year was more important for men because they excreted a greater amount of their spirits when they ejaculated than women, and that they ought to go to sleep straight afterwards. These findings add further credence to the mounting criticisms that Thomas Laqueur’s claim that until the eighteenth century the perceived differences between men’s and women’s bodies were marginal has received.¹²¹ If men and women experienced sleep and sex differently, or at least were expected to, this must have had a cascading impact on domestic medical activities like the ones described in this article.

Perhaps the most significant implication of this article, however, is a better understanding sleep as both a domestic practice and as informed by medical and botanical expertise of the period. Popular regimens, it is shown, hoped that people would carefully and contextually create routines for themselves that involved repetitively eating, moving, excreting, lusting and sleeping, and these were key frameworks in the ways that (particularly pious) individuals framed their bodies and minds in diaries and other kinds of paperwork. These regimens, it is suggested, were impractical or difficult to live up to particularly with regard to sleep and lust, partly because they assumed the individual would be able to prioritise individual health over any collective concerns or pressures, but also because these external determinants were intertwined in cascading ways. Each part of the routine informed and conditioned other bits. This was especially true for sleep and desire, for an immoderate libido would practically and humorally disrupt the ability to get a good night’s rest. By focusing on sleep and sex then, and the connections that medical writers, lay people and cheap print made about them, we see the way that everyday activities within early modern homes were infused with medical, moral and social importance. Choosing whether to sleep or indulge in lustful thoughts or acts when in bed was a bodily, social and moral conundrum in, and one that early modern people clearly grappled with. Uncovering the crossovers between soporific and what have been termed here anti-aphrodisiac botanical ingredients and processes sheds further light on the ways in which early modern people sought to get a good night’s sleep. Perhaps most importantly, then, these findings help us to nuance our understanding of sleep care or sleep medicine in the period as a capacious field of expertise and activity which considered multiple factors including sexuality, centred on bedtime and beds themselves, and harnessed botanical and regimental expertise.¹²²

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Journal’s anonymous reviewers, Sasha Handley, Lauren Kassell, Olivia Weisser and members of the ‘Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective’ at the University of Manchester for reading and commenting on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously funded by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number: 219834/Z/19/Z].

Notes on contributors

Leah Astbury

Leah Astbury is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome project ‘Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World: An Environmental Approach to the History of Sleep Care’ at the University of Manchester. Prior to this she was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and the 2017/18 Molina Fellow in History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library, San Marino. She has published on the history of gender, medicine and the family in the early modern period.

Notes

1. Nehemiah Wallington, ‘A Record of the Marcies of God MS 204’, in David Booy (ed.), The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection (London: Routledge, 2017), 35–36

2. Wallington, ‘A Record of the Marcies of God’, 43

3. Wallington, ‘A Record of the Marcies of God’, 45

4. Wallington, ‘A Record of the Marcies of God’, 45

5. Tessa Storey, ‘English and Italian health advice: Protestant and Catholic bodies’, in Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Conserving health in early modern culture. Bodies and environments in Italy and England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 210–34.

6. Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014).

7. Sasha Handley, ‘Sleep-piety and healthy sleep in early modern English households’ in Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (eds), Conserving health in early modern culture: Bodies and environments in Italy and England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 185–209, p. 186.

8. Elizabeth K. Hunter, “To Cause Sleepe Safe and Shure: Dangerous Substances, Sleep Medicine and Poison Theories in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 35, no. 2 (2022): 473–93.

9. Sasha Handley, ‘Faithful Slumber’ in Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 69–107, Alec Ryrie, ‘Sleeping, waking and dreaming in Protestant piety’ in J. Martin and A. Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, (Ashgate: 2012), 73–93 and Erin Sullivan, ‘The watchful spirit: Religious anxieties toward sleep in seventeenth_century England,’ Cultural History, no.1 (2012): 14–35.

10. Alice Dolan, “Touching Linen: Textiles, Emotion and Bodily Intimacy in England c. 1708–1818,” Cultural and Social History 16/2 (2019): 145–164, p. 151.

11. McShane, ‘Making Beds, making households’; Handley, ‘Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet’; Gowing, ‘The Twinkling of a Bedstaff’ and Holly Fletcher, ‘Making Beds & Stuffing Pillows: Sleep, Materiality and Environment in Early Modern England’ [forthcoming].

12. OED.

13. Angela McShane, ‘Making beds, making households: the domestic and emotional landscape of the bed in early modern England’, Pre-Publication Draft, www.academia.edu/39035802/, (accessed April, 2023); Sasha Handley, “Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet” History Workshop Journal 85 (2018), 169–194 and Laura Gowing, “The Twinkling of a Bedstaff: Recovering the Social Life of English Beds 1500–1700”, The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, 11 no.3 (2014), 275–304.

14. Storey, English and Italian health advice: Protestant and Catholic bodies, 220.

15. Thomas Phaer, The Kegiment [sic] of life whereunto is added A treatyse of the pestilence, with the booke of children newly corrected and enlarged by T. Phayer (London, 1546), sig. M3r.

16. William Vaughan, Naturall and artificial directions for health deriued from the best philosophers, as well modern, as auncient (London, 1600), 30.

17. Tobias Venner, Viae rectae ad vitam longam, pars secunda VVherin the true vse of sleepe, exercise, excretions, and peturbationsis, with their effects, discussed and applied to euery age, constitution of body, and time of yeare (London, 1623), 2.

18. Ibid. See also: Handley, ‘Healthy sleep and the household’ in Sleep in early modern England, 39–68.

19. Venner, Viae rectae ad longam, 5.

20. Vaughan, Naturall and artificial directions for health, 30.

21. Hannah Newton, ‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’: convalescent care in early modern England’, in Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (eds.), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England, Social Histories of Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 104–132.

22. Vaughan, Naturall and artificial directions for health, 32.

23. Vaughan, Naturall and artificial directions for health, 32.

24. Leah Astbury, ‘Ordering the Infant’: Caring for newborns in early modern England’, in Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (eds), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England, Social Histories of Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 80–103.

25. Humphrey Brooke, Ugieine or A conservatory of health. Comprized in a plain and practical discourse (London, 1650), sig. A4r.

26. Handley, ‘Sleep and Sociability’ in Sleep in Early Modern England, 149–180.

27. Alec Ryrie, ‘Sleeping, waking and dreaming in Protestant piety’ in J. Martin and A. Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate: 2012), 73–92, p. 76.

28. Sandra Cavallo ‘Secrets of Healthy Living. The Revival of the Preventative Paradigm in Late Renaissance Italy’ in Elaien Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 191–212 and Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Morality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 237–73.

29. Jennifer Richards, ‘Useful Books: Reading Vernacular Regimens in Sixteenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, no.2 (2012), 247–271.

30. Thomas Cogan, Hauen of health Chiefly gathered for the comfort of students, and consequently of all those that have a care of their health (London, 1636), 9.

31. Ibid.

32. Andrew Boorde, Hereafter foloweth a compendious regiment or a dietary of helth made in Mountpyllier, unfoliated (London, 1542).

33. Leah Astbury, “When a Woman Hates Her Husband: Love, Sex and Fruitful Marriages in Early Modern England”, Gender & History, no.3 (2020), 523–541.

34. Cogan, The Haven of Health, sig. B6v.

35. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 22–29.

36. Cogan, The Haven of Health, 280.

37. Santorio Santorio, Medicina Statica, or, Rules of health in eight sections of aphrorisms, (London, 1676), 24.

38. Giovanni Benedetto Sinbibaldi, Rare Verities. The cabinet of Venus unlocked, and her secrets laid open (London, 1658), 68.

39. Nicholas Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal’d written in French by Nicholas de Venette, The 8^th edition (London, 1707), 112. See also: Roy Porter, “Spreading Carnal Knowledge or Selling Dirt Cheap? Nicholas Venette’s Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal in Eighteenth Century England”, Journal of European Studies 14, no. 56 (1984), 233–255.

40. Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal’d, 113.

41. Stefan Hanß, “Hair Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean”, History Workshop Journal 87, no. 1 (2019), 160–187.

42. Venette, Conjugal Love Reveal’d, 116.

43. Lesel Dawson, ‘”My Love is a Fever’: Medical Constructions of Desire in Early Modern England’, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12-45.

44. Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal’d, 133–5.

45. Elyot, Castel of Health, 40–41.

46. Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal’d, 133–5.

47. Vaughan, Naturall and artificial directions for health deriued, 46.

48. Levinus Lemnius, The secret miracles of nature in four books: learnedly and moderately treating of generation, and the parts thereof, the soul, and its immortality, of plants and living creatures (London, 1658), 9.

49. Boorde, The Breuiarie of Health VVherin doth folow, remedies, for all maner of sicknesses & diseases, the which may be in a man or woman (London, 1587), 50 v.

50. Everard Maynwaringe, The Method and Means of Enjoying Health, vigour, and long life (London, 1683), 152.

51. Maynwaringe, A treatise of consumptions (London, 1666), 101

52. Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal’d, 139.

53. Sarah Jinner, The womans almanack or, prognostication for ever: shewing the nature of the planets, with the events that shall befall women and children born under them (London, 1659), unpaginated.

54. Charles Peter, Observations on the Venereal Disease with the True Way of Curing the Same (London, 1686), 3–4.

55. See for example: Olivia Weisser, “Treating the Secret Disease: Sex, Sin, and Authority in Eighteenth-Century Venereal Cases”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, no. 4 (2017): 685–712, p. 691.

56. Aristoteles Master-piece (London, 1684), p. 10

57. Jakob Ruff, The Expert Midwife, or An Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of Generation (London, 1637), pp. 152–3.

58. Athenian Mercury, 1/18 May (1691). Original emphasis.

59. Daniel Sennert, Two Treatises The first, of the venereal pocks (London, 1660), 15.

60. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London, 1671), 301.

61. Thomas Tryon, Wisdoms Dictates, or, Aphorisms & Rules, Physical, Moral, and Divine (London, 1691), 106.

62. Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 84 and Laura Gowing, “The Twinkling of a Bedstaff: Recovering the Social Life of English Beds 1500–1700”, The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, no.3 (2014), 275–304.

63. Elaine Leong notes that Elizabeth Digby, George Noble, Joseph Brooker and an anonymous compiler all copied out sections from Gerard’s Herbal. See: “Herbals she peruseth’: reading medicine in early modern England”, Renaissance Studies 28/, no. 4 (2014), 556–578.

64. Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), sig. Gg 1 r. See also: Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’, 557.

65. John Pechey, The compleat herbal of physical plants containing all such English and foreign herbs (London, 1694), 144.

66. A boke of the propreties of herbes called an herbal whereunto is added the time herbes, floures and sedes shold be gathered (London, 1552), sig. C1v.

67. Ibid, sig. A1v.

68. The grete herbal whiche geueth parfyt knowlege and vnderstandyng of all maner of herbes [and] there gracious vertues whiche god hath ordeyned for our prosperous welfare (London, 1526), sig. E1v.

69. A Newe Herball of Macer, translated out of Laten in to Englysshe (London, 1543), sig. A1v.

70. John Gerard, The herbal or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1630), 821.

71. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1670), 33.

72. William Coles, Adam in Eden, or, Natures paradise (London, 1657), 6.

73. Philip Barrough, The Methode of Physicke Conteyning the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Invvard diseases in man (London, 1583), p. 142.

74. Gerard, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1633), 310.

75. William Coles, Adam in Eden, or, Natures Paradise the History of Plants, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers with their Several Names (London, 1657), p. 131.

76. William Westmacott, Historia Vegetabilium Sacra, or, A Scripture Herbal Wherein all the Trees, Shrubs, Herbs, Plants, Flowers, Fruits &c mentioned in the Holy Bible, are in an alphabetical order (London, 1695), pp. 52 and 111

77. ‘A Pharmacopoeia’, MS MSL 66, fol. 43 v, Wellcome Library, London.

78. John Pechey, The Compleat Herbal of Physical Plants containing all such English and foreign herbs, shrubs and trees as are used in physick and surgery (London, 1694), 72.

79. Coles, Adam in Eden, 52.

80. Pechey, Compleat Herbal, 65.

81. Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 62–6 and Elizabeth Hunter, “To Cause Sleepe Safe and Shure: Dangerous Substances, Sleep Medicine and Poison Theories in Early Modern England”, Social History of Medicine 35/, no. 2 (2022), 473–493.

82. Charles Peter, Observations on the Venereal Disease with the True Way of Curing the Same (London, 1686), 3–4.

83. Venette, Conjugal Love, 140–1.

84. D Petre, MS Codex 624, 1705, 47, University of Pennsylvania Kislak Library, Philadelphia.

85. Ibid.

86. Margaret Wentworth and William Fell, ‘Receipt book, ca. 1679–1694’, V.b.363, 3, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

87. Tower family of South Weald, ‘Almanac 1767’, D/DTw/F 4/1/7, unfoliated, Essex Record Office, Chelmsford.

88. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 64.

89. Richard Perssehouse, ‘Biofolium miscellany of medical, domestic, and veterinary recipes’, 1643, X.d.738, fol. 2 r, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

90. ‘An anonymous eighteenth-century recipe book containing culinary, medical and household recipes’, MS 485, 41, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

91. Hester Denbigh, ‘Cookery and medical receipts, c. 1700’, Whitney cookery collection, v. 11, fol. 5 r, New York Public Library, New York.

92. This recipe is attributed to a ‘Doctor Wharton’, RTC01, no. 208, Firestone Library, University of Princeton.

93. Gertrude Holcroft, ‘Recipe book c. 1651–1700, once in the possession of Gertrude Holcroft’, MS 687, fol. 40 r and fol. 40 v, Brotherton Library, Leeds.

94. D Petre, MS Codex 624, 26.

95. Thomas Sheppey, ‘A book of choice receipts collected from several famous authors’, ca. 1675, 269–270, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. I thank Olivia Weisser for this reference.

96. Edward Newton, ‘Recipe book 1690–1802?’, Oversize LJS 165, unfoliated, Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvannia, Philadelphia.

97. Jane Jackson, ‘Jane Jacksone her Booke: written in the yeare 1642’, MS 373, fol. 54 r, Wellcome Library, London.

98. Anonymous, MS Gen 545, 29, University of Glasgow Special Collections, Glasgow.

99. ‘A collection of medical receipts’, 1702, MS 504, 8, Royal College of Physicians Library, London.

100. Ibid., 32.

101. Cotton Mather, ‘Diary of Cotton Mather 1681–1708’, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Seventh Series, v. II, 48–9.

102. Quoted in: David Stevenson, “Recording the Unspeakable: Masturbation in the Diary of William Drummond, 1657–1659”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 3 (2000), 223–240.

103. Samuel Pepys, 10 March 1665/6, www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1666/03.

104. Anne Dormer to Elizabeth Trumbull, Add MS 72,516, British Library, London, fol. 192–3.

105. The School of Venus. VVhen lusty lads and lasses meet, and merrily do play; the pleasures are so strong and sweet, both sexes love obey (London: 1684–1700), ‘English Broadside Ballad Archive’, EBBA 34,677, www.ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ (accessed February 10, 2023).

106. The Mourning Conquest (London: 1681–1684?), EBBA 37,485.

107. A Favourite Love Song, undated, EBBA 31 p. 295.

108. The Maids Complaint For want of a Dil doul (London:1681–4), EBBA 21,716.

109. A Rare new Ballad, Entituled My Husband has no Courage in Him, undated, EBBA 34,281.

110. The Discontented Bride, (1685–1688) EBBA 21, p. 783.

111. Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine, 129.

112. Karen Harvey, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England”, Gender & History, 14/2 (2002): 183-368; Sarah Toulalan, “Pornography, Procreation and Pleasure in Early Modern England” in Bradford K. Mudge (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 105-122 and “Bodies, Sex and Sexuality” in Amanda Capern (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 1-24.

113. Alan Bray, “To be a Man in Early Modern Society. The Curious Case of Michael Wigglesworth”, History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), 155-165, p. 161.

114. The School of Venus, Or the Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules of Practice. Being the Translation of the French L’Escoles des filles (1680), 6.

115. William F. MacLehose, “Captivating thoughts: nocturnal pollution, imagination and the sleeping mind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” Journal of Medieval History ,no. 1 (2020): 98–131.

116. Michael Stolberg, “Self-Pollution, Moral Reform, and the Venereal Trade: Notes on the Sources and Historical Context of Onania (1716),” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9/1 (2000): 37–61.

117. A supplement to the Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution (London, 1725), 118.

118. Peter, Observations on the venereal disease, 15.

119. Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Polution And All its Frightful Consequences, in both Sexes Consider’d (London, 1723), pp. 74–75.

120. Ibid, 75.

121. For an excellent summary of these debates see: Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

122. Elizabeth K. Hunter, ‘“To Cause Sleep Safe and Shure”: Dangerous Substances, Sleep Medicine and Poison Theories in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, no.2 (2022), 473–493 and Sasha Handley, Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, ‘Sleeping well in the early modern world: an environmental approach to the history of sleep care’, University of Manchester 2021–2025.