Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away...] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century…
Sadomasochism and Christianity
This is a post on a website entitled "Bad News about Christianity". The name gives a fairly good indication of what it's all about, and there's certainly a lot of detailed information on the website, but unfortunately there is no indication of the identity of the author[s]. This seems to be intentional. Anyway, the post…
The hurt(ful) body
The hurt(ful) body Performing and beholding pain, 1600–1800 Edited by Dr Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck Manchester University Press, July 2017 I know! It has been too long - far too long - since I updated this blog! Nothing could illustrate that more clearly than the fact that this book came…
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes
Kudos to Andrew Kahn, Jamelle Bouie and Tim Jones for this graphic depiction of 20,528 voyages over 315 years, transporting some 12,500,000 Africans out of Africa and into slavery in the Americas. Read the accompanying article here: The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes It's not a new thing - it dates from 2015 -…
Medieval spat
When you have an argument with your partner and you both insist that you are the one suffering the most. #medievaltwitter #medieval pic.twitter.com/pcNl4G2izO— Francois Soyer (@FJSoyer) December 15, 2016…
All those buttons – enough to make you want to end it all!
'All this buttoning and unbuttoning' (anonymous suicide note, 18th century)(Oh, and Merry Christmas)— Early Modern Death (@EarlyModDeath) December 23, 2016…
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…
On Placebos
Probably of relevance to Daniel Goldberg's comments on the history of pain (which I commented on in my last post) is Charles Rosenberg on 'The Efficacy of Placebos: A Historian’s Perspective' (Harvard, May 21). Goldberg has quite a lot to say about placebos, and their place in the history of the perception of pain, and Rosenberg…
On the Treatment of Pain
My attention was caught by two recent publications in the blog of The Appendix ('a quarterly journal of experimental and narrative history'). The first is 'Interpreting “Physick”: The Familiar and Foreign Eighteenth-Century Body', by Lindsay Keiter. The second, in reply to the former, is Daniel S. Goldberg on 'The History of Pain' [UPDATE: Goldberg…
Catching Up…
The last couple of months have been pretty hectic and I haven't had much time to post here, so let me give a brief rundown of recent developments. First, let me start with the stuff I'm missing out on, being here in Japan. I was sorry to miss a roundtable discussion on Violence, Victimhood and…