Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica and the Beginnings of the Pornography of Pain
Rather than developing from native English discourses, the association of Catholicism with sexual flagellation in late seventeenth-century England is mainly a product of the same southern/Latin/Catholic culture that produced the lives of the saints. Most of the same ingredients as are to be found in English writings – political and/or religious pol…
“Hudibras” and the Puritan Mindset
If matrimony and hanging go By dest’ny, why not whipping too? (Samuel Butler, Hudibras. The Second Part, London, 1664), p. 60; 2.1, ll. 839–40). ‘Marriages’, Lyly says, ‘are made in heauen, though consumated in earth’ (John Lyly, Euphues and his England, London, 1580, p. 129), and Eliot renders the French proverb, ‘Qui doibt pendre ne…
Alec Ryrie on Suffering among Early Modern Protestants
I am currently reading Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), which is one of the best books on the Reformation in Britain to come out this year, and perhaps this decade. Ryrie’s book aims to answer in relation to the early modern Protestant the question the little boy at the…
Another review on Amazon
Perversely pleasurable history of pain, written by Christina Koning (reviewer for The Times).…
The Genealogy of Masochism
Krafft-Ebing’s derivation of sadism and masochism from the names of Sade and Sacher-Masoch (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie, 1886; edition used, 1894, p. 11) may not be fully analogous to Freud’s appropriation of the name of Oedipus, but still less can the relationship between Sade and Sacher-Masoch…
The Dominatrix in Early Modern Times
Saint Jerome tells a queer story of a Christian captured by the Romans. To destroy his soul, rather than his body he was (as the Catholic translation of 1630 has it) taken and … led aside into a most delicious garden & there in the middest of pure lyllies, and blushing roses, (where also a…
Another review on Amazon
REVIEW: "Penance and Repentance" by Eamonn Vincent…
Discourses of Suffering reviewed on Amazon
REVIEW: "Breaking new ground in history of sexuality" by Joseph O'Leary.…
Homoeroticism in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
Unlike Catholic suffering, which (at least in its monastic context, where penance went hand in hand with chastity) was frequently overtly linked with sexuality, Protestant suffering generally relates to sex only obliquely. Whereas, for example, Anthony of Padua’s biographer explicitly traces the saint’s determination to eradicate sexual desire by m…
Germans as Victims
Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci, eds, Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (Rodopi, 2011) I must admit, I haven't read this yet, but I find the concept interesting. As the promotional blurb has it, 'The focus of this interdisciplinary volume is both on the historical roots o…