Shaking Hands and the Politics of Touch in Early Modern England

Drawing on work in the social sciences on the handshake, this article examines the role of the handshake as a form of gestural communication and traces the changes in its relative importance in the ‘access rituals’ of early modern England. We lack a history of the handshake for early modern England. Such work as there is, is chronologically discontinuous and largely blind to the sociology of its performance. Working across the period from the later fifteenth into the eighteenth century, the article seeks to recover the chronological, spatial, social and gendered contours to the handshake. Discussing early modern understandings of the social and cultural meanings of touch and the hand, the article explores how performing a handshake could play a part in the representation, reproduction and negotiation of social and political relationships. Examining the micro-politics of shaking hands, the article offers a critical historical assessment of modern readings of the handshake as signalling friendship and social solidarity, analysing the changing significance of the ‘handshake entitlement’ as a ‘status-regulated’ gesture that helped both to enact and to challenge early modern social and political order.