The Civilizing Process and the Decline of Violence
THE DEBATE over whether humanity is becoming less violent has its beginnings in Ted Robert Gurr's 1982 article "Historical trends in violent crime : a critical review of the evidence" (in Tonry and Morris, eds, Crime and Justice : an Annual Review of Research). Several other studies, mainly based on homicide data from Scandinavia and…
Two new books on the history of pain
Continuing my attempt to keep up with research in the field, here are two recent publications in the field of medical humanities. Rob Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Chapters by Rob Boddice, Javier Mocoso, Paolo Santangelo, David Biro, Joanna Bourke, Wilfried Witte, Nouémi Tousignant, Sheen…
Medieval Manuscripts: the Crude and the Macabre
I am working on a couple of substantial pieces, which I'll post in due course. Here are a couple of tidbits in the meantime... Bored to tears. (Leodegar of Poitiers; c. 1200.) pic.twitter.com/6wEYhB1Bkh — Euan McCartney (@euanmccartney) February 10, 2015 Sawly missed. (Lyon, Bibl. mun., ms. 0177; c. 1460.) #morbidmonday pic.twitter.com/MHYCdRptdG —…
Damned if we do! Using the EEBO TCP Database
Can we use the EEBO TCP database? This looks like a no-brainer - what would be the use of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership if we can't use it? - but it's actually something of a minefield. How often, I wonder, has work citing the database been met with a response like…
Responding to criticism
To what extent should one respond to criticism of one’s work? Should one respond to it at all? Perhaps one should take a lofty attitude and simply let the critics make of one’s work what they will. Or perhaps one owes it to oneself and to scholarship to clarify things and explain oneself. I accept,…
Using the Early English Books Online and Text Creation Partnership Databases
(This post contains the substance of a presentation I gave at the Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Society of Japan in October, 2014.) For those who are not familiar, here is an introduction to the use of the Early English Books Online database (EEBO): EEBO requires a log-in, but many - if not most -…
Remember, remember…
Harald Braun on the real victims of the gunpowder Plot - the vast majority of law-abiding English Catholics. Is there a lesson in this for modern times? Too right there is! And here's a little something from my early modern bookshelf: Happy Guy Fawkes Night, everyone!…
Protestant Reception of Catholic Literature
This is a PowerPoint presentation I made at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, Edmund Murray College, University of Cambridge, September 12th, 2014. It contains the gist of two recently-published papers, "The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700" (Recusant History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2014), pp. 67-89), and "Robert…
Torture and the Art of Holy Dying
[For this post I am indebted to Olivia Weisser who, in response to my post on The Sufferings of the Martyrs and the Transgressive Female Gaze, very kindly sent me an extract from her dissertation, Gender and Illness in Early Modern England (John Hopkins, 2010), which she is currently working up for publication with Yale…
Two Recent Books on Gender and Violence in the Early Modern Period
1. Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas, eds., Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As the blurb has it, "During the early modern period in England, social expectations for men came under extreme pressure; the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared. Here, original ess…