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…
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…
Masochism in Political Behaviour
A few months ago I commented on Jeremy Carrette's essay, 'Intense Exchange: Sadomasochism, Theology and the Politics of Late Capitalism', expressing frustration at the way in which the author speaks of the need to 'free our gendered bodies from the market of global exploitation', but refuses to commit himself to identifying sadomasochism either as …
The Sufferings of the Martyrs and the Transgressive Female Gaze
Sharon Howard, 'Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World', Social History of Medicine, 16:3 (2003), pp. 367-382, is one of those articles that appeared some years ago, but which I have only just come across. (The link, by the way, is to…
“Necessary” suffering
I posted this on Quora, in answer to someone who wanted to know if there is such a thing as necessary suffering. To see the complete thread, click here (you'll need to create a log-in ID if you want to add comments). In an age before anaesthetics this question could hardly even have been asked.…
Conference: Pain and Suffering in Early Modern Performance and the Visual Arts
Click here for a detailed programme of events. Please don't contact me in connection with this event, since I am neither organizing it nor taking part in it! I am simply passing on the information. If anyone does attend it and would like to pass on some feedback to me, that would be very welcome!…
Forthcoming book on Pain
Watch out for Robert Boddice, ed., Pain and Emotion in Modern History, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). The contents page can be viewed on academia.edu. Mostly focuses on more recent history, but there is at least one paper on the early modern period.…
“Hudibras” and the Puritan Mindset
If matrimony and hanging go By dest’ny, why not whipping too? (Samuel Butler, Hudibras. The Second Part, London, 1664), p. 60; 2.1, ll. 839–40). ‘Marriages’, Lyly says, ‘are made in heauen, though consumated in earth’ (John Lyly, Euphues and his England, London, 1580, p. 129), and Eliot renders the French proverb, ‘Qui doibt pendre ne…
Alec Ryrie on Suffering among Early Modern Protestants
I am currently reading Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), which is one of the best books on the Reformation in Britain to come out this year, and perhaps this decade. Ryrie’s book aims to answer in relation to the early modern Protestant the question the little boy at the…
