“Jesus wept: and no wonder by Christ!”
"Jesus wept" - the shortest verse in the Bible (John 11:35) and the subject of a short piece on by Thomas Dixon on Umberto Eco and John Donne in the History of Emotions blog. The post makes the point that "Donne is one of a very few sermon writers to discuss Christ’s tears", though I…
Blog round-up
First off, I should say I was in the middle of writing a blog post on a lecture on ecstasy (the emotion, rather than the drug, though the latter did get a couple of mentions!) that I'd been to in London when there was a bereavement in the family and everything got put on hold…
Masochism and Anachronism
What does it mean to talk of "masochism" prior to the publication, in 1870, of Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz [Venus in furs], or of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's adoption of Masoch's name to describe the condition of deriving pleasure from pain in Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie [Sexual psychopathy: a clinical / forensic study]…
Reviews of Pain, Pleasure and Perversity
1. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Renaissance Quarterly, 67.1 (Spring 2014), pp. 306-307. Dr. van Dijkhuizen is a lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University. He is the author of Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (D. S. Brewer, 2012). Soundbite: a thoroughly researched and highly original addition to the g…
What’s wrong with Pain, Pleasure and Perversity?
To say I wrote it in 9 months flat, not much. Two years after publication I've had enough feedback and enough time to think about it to be able to reflect on it and, while one or two flaws have been pointed out to me, nothing particularly damaging to my basic argument has come to…
The OED and EEBO TCP
Last Christmas, a friend who happens to be an antiquarian bookseller posted on Facebook an image of what he took to be the first recorded instance of the expression "merry Christmas" in print. The book in question was An Itinerary VVritten by Fynes Moryson Gent (1617). A basic search on the Early English Books Online…
Digital humanities links
A downloadable list of some of the most useful digital sources I've come across so far. Click here.…
Tidbit: Laud eating Prynne’s ears!
Archbishop #Laud supposedly dining on ears of Wllm Prynne! "Canterbury, his change of diot"1641 (Bod) #EarlyModern pic.twitter.com/BOe7FRu35t — Maia Newley (@MettaFilms) June 12, 2015 Under inverkan av specifikt fosfodiesteras typ 5 genomgĂĄr cGMP hydrolys, vilket leder till att erektionen upphör. Detta är användningsomrĂĄdet för SC. Som svar pĂĄ sexu…
Early modern discourse communities: Catholics and Protestants
A discourse community can be defined as having six clear characteristics: 1. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” 2. “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” 3. “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.” 4. “A dis…
John Gray on the decline of violence
John Gray argues in The Guardian that Pinker's got his sums all wrong and there has been no decline in violence.…