Discourses of suffering revisited: what was it all about?
I posted a reply to a question on Quora that has attracted quite a lot of attention. The question was, "Can you fail a Ph.D. thesis defence?" and, having failed mine twice, I felt I was in a good position to answer! Several people posted comments asking what the thesis was about so, instead of…
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…
Pain, Pleasure and Perversity on Google Books
I'm happy to see that Google Books now gives a very generous preview of my book. Click here and check it out!…
Responding to criticism
To what extent should one respond to criticism of one’s work? Should one respond to it at all? Perhaps one should take a lofty attitude and simply let the critics make of one’s work what they will. Or perhaps one owes it to oneself and to scholarship to clarify things and explain oneself. I accept,…
Review of Pain. Pleasure and Perversity
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…
The Early Modern View of Evil
I’d like in this post to ruminate a bit on some points raised in a couple of papers on early modern thinking on the nature of evil by Samuel Newlands. The papers are: Leibniz on Privations, Limitations, and the Metaphysics of Evil (henceforth ‘Leibnitz’) Evils, Privations, and the Early Moderns (henceforth ‘Evils’) A full list…
Discourses of Suffering on Kindle
Discourses of Suffering, already published in hardback, is now available on Kindle.…
Sexual flagellation in early modern times
Foucault’s claims about the frankness and tolerance of early modern discourse (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité 1: La Volonté de Savoir, Paris, 1976, p. 9.) are echoed by Toulalan, who says, ‘feelings of shame in desiring to be whipped to achieve…
John Bunyan
Given that Bunyan accepts the premises of a God who can actually bestow an eternity of bliss on the chosen and a devil who will eternally torture the condemned it makes good sense for him to submit to the metaphorical ‘rod’ of his Lord for the sake of the salvation of his soul. The belief…
