Suffering in the Modern World #2: Those who live by the sword…
Another political post, that has nothing (much) to do with the seventeenth century (except, perhaps, insofar as 'plus ça change...'). I'm not planning to make a habit of posts like these - I just want to get it off my chest! I don't think I have ever been so upset by a news story as…
Suffering in the Modern World #1: Torture in the USA
I'm sorry, but this post can hardly avoid being political! The degree of cruelty and sheer nastiness that one finds in seventeenth-century discourse is connected, in part, with the extent to which pain was publicly inflicted. Whole families might gather to enjoy the spectacle of a bear being tormented by dogs, a public flogging, or…
Discourses of Suffering on Kindle
Discourses of Suffering, already published in hardback, is now available on Kindle.…
Suffering Saints
During the seventeenth century, there were more than a hundred Catholic editions in English of exemplary lives of saints and other holy people, most of which emphasize a willingness – amounting sometimes to what appears to be a compulsion – to suffer pain and degradation, in conjunction with avowals of chastity and a rejection of…
Watching the suffering of others
A public domain thesis on the effect of witnessing scenes of people in distant places suffering in the media:Maria Kyriakidou, Watching the Pain of Others: Audience Discourses of Distant Suffering in Greece. This thesis can also be viewed here.…
The history of emotions
There's a good blog on the history of emotions here. It contains an interesting review of Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a work which I had not previously come across.…
Christia Mercer on suffering and sympathy
Here is a link to a PDF file placed in the public domain by Christia Mercer, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College. Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz and Anne Conway Mercer also has a chapter in Sympathy: A History (OUP, 2015). The links are valid at the time of posting; if…
Dissection and anatomy
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 1995; paperback, 1996) This book gives a fascinating account the beginnings of scientific rationalism, and the way in which the body came to be seen as a kind of machine, with a wide array of sources ranging from the literary and…
Masochism and Empowerment in Nineteenth-century Women’s Novels
Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton University Press, 2000) This is another book that lies outside the geographical and temporal scope of Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, but is nevertheless of interest in the context of the genealogy of masochism (which is, I suppose, the central underlying theme of my own …
Sexual flagellation in early modern times
Foucault’s claims about the frankness and tolerance of early modern discourse (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité 1: La Volonté de Savoir, Paris, 1976, p. 9.) are echoed by Toulalan, who says, ‘feelings of shame in desiring to be whipped to achieve…
