Bodies in the belfry: gender, sociability and urban space in early eighteenth-century London

Bells were central to eighteenth-century politics, culture and community, and yet we have little understanding of those that set them ringing. This article uses a manuscript compiled by the London bell-ringer and horologist William Laughton to trace how ringing offered men the opportunity to materialize civil manners, efface cultures of insult and work out forms of patriarchal fraternity through repetitive, ritual embodiment. Ringers imagined bells as women's tongues to be set right and the belfry, sociable spaces and the household as layered transparencies that, when seen through each other, gave meaning to their urban associational culture.