Check out Jan Frans van Dijkhuisen’s review of Pain, Pleasure and Perversity here: You’ll need a JSTOR log-in to read the whole thing, but if anyone without one is particularly keen to read it, just e-mail me and I may be able to sort you out!
Anyway, here’s the first paragraph, just to give you a taster:
Pain, Pleasure and Perversity is a thoroughly researched and
highly original addition to the growing scholarly conversation on conceptions of suffering, embodiment, and sensory experience in early modern culture. Recent studies on these topics have focused at least in part on the impact that the religious upheavals of the Reformation period had on the way early modern Europeans understood the nature of embodiment and on the meanings they attached to bodily suffering. Yamamoto-Wilson’s study approaches the interplay between religious change and the cultural understanding of suffering more directly from the perspective of sexuality. His interest is partly in changing perceptions of self-inflicted religious suffering. He argues that during the seventeenth century self-inflicted pain, with self-flagellation as one of its more conspicuous manifestations, began to be seen as masochistic — as a species of sexual perversion, rather than as a form of imitatio Christi. Especially during the decades after the
Restoration, suffering seems to have lost much of the punitive and redemptive connotations that it carried in pre-Reformation culture. Pain, Pleasure and Perversity is divided into three parts that examine this development through the prisms of “the suffering self,” “the suffering of others,” and “suffering and gender.”
Van Dijkhuisen is the author of several works on the subject of early modern suffering, notably his recent monograph, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture.
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