Early modern women
Mary Astell, Magdalene College, gender inequality in the early modern period and today, and a few resources for scholars in the field.…
This blog is on a new platform
As I said in my previous post, I was having technical problems uploading a new-look website to Discourses of Suffering. It turned out the blog was the cause of the problems, and because of this I have had to move the blog onto another platform. It’s los…
The evils of technology
If you try to follow links to the main website (Discourses of Suffering main site), you will notice that they don't currently work. An installation of WordPress on the main site conflicted with the blog, which is also a WordPress site, with disastrous consequences. I'm hoping the host provider is going to be able to…
Early modern studies: Ebooks
It's been a while since I posted here. I did a lot of travelling in 2023, there are other projects I'm working on, and suddenly I find it's been months since I last posted. It's not that I haven't been working on the early modern period. Last summer, I was back in the University Library…
“Three Thomases”: Tres Thomae, a Catholic work by Thomas Stapleton
Here is another text-searchable PDF file of an early modern text. Here's the link. This is the second (1612) edition of Thomas Stapleton's account of the lives of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Beckett and Thomas More. The first edition was published in Douai in 1588. Somewhat neglected these days, Stapleton was a leading Catholic controversialist…
Hamlet’s tragic flaw is not hesitation, “To be or not to be” is not about suicide – and it matters!!
Different critics have talked about Hamlet's tragic flaw in different ways, but what most of them boil down to is dithering. Coleridge talks about "the lingering…
ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚA [Basilika]. The Works of King Charles the Martyr
Another text-searchable PDF file of a seventeenth-century text. Here's the link. This is the second (1687) edition of a folio publication, over 700 pages long, divided into two parts, with the option of viewing further subdivisions for convenience / speed of downloading. Although the book is billed as being Charles's own work, John Gauden, Bishop…
Literature and terrorism
The go-to guy for an understanding of the ways in which terrorism has been represented in literature is Peter C. Herman, author of Terrorism and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 (Routledge, 2019). Although his scope is broader than the early modern period, he dev…
Protestant / Catholic polemic: Lucius Cary (Viscount of Falkland), Thomas White and William Chillingworth
The 1660 edition of Lucius Cary's Discourse of Infallibility (first published in 1646 ) is my latest book scan. There's more interest these days in Cary's mother, Elizabeth (1585–1639), the first woman writer known to have written a play. Elizabeth Cary's literary career isn't really relevant here, but she plays a part in the complex…
Discourses of suffering revisited: what was it all about?
I posted a reply to a question on Quora that has attracted quite a lot of attention. The question was, "Can you fail a Ph.D. thesis defence?" and, having failed mine twice, I felt I was in a good position to answer! Several people posted comments asking what the thesis was about so, instead of…