ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚA [Basilika]. The Works of King Charles the Martyr
Another text-searchable PDF file of a seventeenth-century text. Here's the link. This is the second (1687) edition of a folio publication, over 700 pages long, divided into two parts, with the option of viewing further subdivisions for convenience / speed of downloading. Although the book is billed as being Charles's own work, John Gauden, Bishop…
A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice, for the Trial of K. Charles I.
This full-page frontispiece is prefaced by the following poem: These lines speak for themselves, describing "Albion" as "Three Nations doom'd t'eternal slavery", symbolized by the figures crushed under the wheels of the hellish chariot that represents the Interregnum and Cromwell's Protectorate. That gives a pretty clear idea of where this book is …
MAURUS SCOTT, CATHOLIC MARTYR (SCANNED DOCUMENT)
It's a common enough tale, I suppose. Young man goes to Cambridge, studies law, goes to the inner Temple to complete his training, gets converted to Catholicism and ends up being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Maurus Scott was one of some 355 Catholics who were either put to death or died in prison…
Protestant Polemic and the Japanese Martyrs
This is my first post for a while, partly because I've been focusing on other things, and partly because, when I did turn my attention in this direction and tried to post, the blog had disappeared! It took a while, but eventually I managed to sort out the problems and get it back, so here…
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 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…
Sophie Oliver, ‘Sacred and (Sub)human Pain’, Facebook Beheadings…
Thoughts arising from Sophie Oliver, ‘Sacred and (Sub)humanPain: The Body as Witness in Early Modern Hagiography and ContemporaryLiterature of Atrocity’, in Nancy Billias, ed., Promoting and Producing Evil (Editions Rodopi, 2010), pp. 119-137. An earlier version of this paper is available online here. In the following I draw on both versions. Olive…