ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Expression and Experience: Mary Toft’s Feelings and her Rabbit Births of 1726”, Dr Karen Harvey (University of Sheffield)

When: 12pm – 1.30pm, Wednesday 27 November
Location: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, University of Sydney
Cost: Free
Contact: Cassie Charlton (cassie.charlton@sydney.edu.au)
In September 1726, Mary Toft gave birth to seventeen rabbits or parts of rabbits. Having looked at the animals during her pregnancy, their image was imprinted on the foetus. Mary Toft was attended by at least six respected doctors, but none declared the affair a hoax until Toft confessed on 7th December 1726. The case caused a sensation. Toft was portrayed as a devious woman who set out to hoodwink the doctors and make her fortune. Historians working within a medical, intellectual or cultural history framework, the case marks a turning point in professional medical opinion or masculine control of the female body. This paper seeks instead to refocus our attention onto Mary’s body and her physical and emotional experiences. It uses her own confessions and applies social, women’s and micro history to reconstruct Mary Toft’s physical, social and mental world.

Karen Harvey read Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, before moving to Royal Holloway, University of London where she gained an MA in Women’s History and later her PhD. She subsequently worked on the project ‘Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1840’ at Manchester University, was then appointed to the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Royal Holloway), before joining the University of Sheffield’s history department in 2003. Karen has held fellowships at the Clark Library, UCLA and the Huntington. She is a founder member of the Sheffield Materializing Culture Research Network, is part of the Eighteenth-Century Research Group, and is currently Academic in Residence at Bank Street Arts.