Karl Wood is an associate professor in the Department of Anglophone Literatures at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. His publications include a monograph and recent articles related to transnational spa culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focusing on German and North American spas. As part of the Horizon-2020 DIGITENS project, he authored or co-authored a number of articles for the DIGIT.EN.S, the Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Eighteenth Century, and co-edited a special issue of the journal Literature & History devoted to sociability and discourses of nature.

The Boundaries of Culture and Nature in the Transnational Spa in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Over the long eighteenth century and through much of the long nineteenth, the spa was a transnational heterotopic social space in which boundaries were drawn, tested, and transgressed. As a locale where the culture of an urbane sociability was embedded in a natural setting, the spa lay at the intersection of culture and nature. Here, both nature itself and access to its bounty was regulated by intertwining of cultural practices, habitus, and the built environment. The resulting spa culture exhibited broad transnational patterns found across national boundaries in this period, while at the same time, local peculiarities were also evident, be they in Britain, France, German lands, or even in provincial North America.

This paper will seek to explore two examples of how the intertwined boundaries of culture and nature were defined and negotiated in two spas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The German spa of Pyrmont near Hannover serves as an example of a prominent and cosmopolitan spa of the eighteenth century, where the boundaries of society were negotiated at the intersection of urbanity and nature. The second case is Saratoga Springs, New York, founded around 1800 as an attempt to establish spa culture and refinement in what saw itself as a fairly egalitarian society, in a locale much closer to “untamed” nature. In this case, while there were clearly attempts to mimic some of the class-based nature of some European spas, more peculiar boundaries drawn were less of the estate vs. class nature and instead rooted in the discourses of settler colonialism and the civilized/savage binary.