Toulalan, _Imagining Sex_
Toulalan's book gives a fairly comprehensive insight into attitudes towards sex in the seventeenth century, building on the insights gained by works like Ian Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (OUP, 2000), but I have a fair few criticisms. Toulalan assumes that Foucault got it right in saying that, at the dawn…
The Art of Suffering
Ann Thompson, The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-Century Anti-Providential Thought (Ashgate, 2003). This book gives a useful insight into the decline of the 'art of suffering' in the seventeenth century. As Thompson explains, during the earlier part of the century, writers like Richard Rogers, Paul Baynes, John Downame, Henry Scudde…
Pain and Compassion
Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (D.S. Brewer, 2012) This came out after I had submitted my manuscript to the publishers, and I was therefore not able to make use of it in my own work. However, Dijkhuizen wrote ‘Religious Meanings of Pain in Early Modern England’,…
The Sex Lives of Saints
This is another book I found very useful in my work on early modern attitudes towards suffering. Virgina Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), discusses the saints of the early Christian period, but it got me thinking about how the accounts of these saints were received in the early modern…
Recommended Reading: _Erotic Subjects_
Of all the modern scholarship I consulted in the writing of my own book, Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2011) was probably the one I liked best. Admittedly, my reasons for liking it are very subjective - its treatment of the issue of the discursive…
