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I have recently moved this blog from another platform. The text content is intact, but images, links, etc., all need to be brought up to date. I am currently (June, 2025) working on this. Please bear with me for a few weeks!
BLOG HOMEIt's been a while since I posted here. I've been doing a lot of travelling, there are other projects I'm working on, and suddenly I find it's been months since I last posted. It's not that I haven't been…
Here is another text-searchable PDF file of an early modern text. Here's the link. Tres Thomae (1612), title page. Click here for the complete text. This is the second (1612) edition of Thomas Stapleton's account of the lives of Thomas…
Hamlet’s tragic flaw is not hesitation, “To be or not to be” is not about suicide – and it matters!!
https://youtu.be/erp1nJx3jHA This is a video I've been planning to make for some time now. I finally got round to it, and it makes the case fairly clearly for understanding Hamlet's soliloquy as being about revenge, not suicide. There is quite…
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…
The go-to guy for an understanding of the ways in which terrorism has been represented in literature is Peter C. Herman, author of Terrorism and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to…
Lucius Cary (1610-1643) The 1660 edition of Lucius Cary's Discourse of Infallibility (first published in 1646 ) is my latest book scan. There's more interest these days in Cary's mother, Elizabeth (1585–1639), the first woman writer known to have written…
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…
Wentworth's path from Lord Deputy of Ireland to the executioner's axe is well enough known in its broad outlines, but with so many twists and nuances that it is hard to evaluate. The decisive change in his fortunes came when…
The scanning continues! I had some technical problems that needed dealing with, so I'm two or three months behind with the early modern book scans, but I'm back in production now. Henry Wharton's 1695 edition of Laud's account of his…
I've added a page to my website giving details of some of the main online databases and resources for the early modern period. Click here: Early modern digital humanities. I'm sure there are many useful resources I haven't added, so…
Go straight to the scanned book Although this work was published many years after the events it describes, and its main content is reprinted, it also contains the first printing of a number of letters relating to the plot. It…
Frontispiece 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…
Go straight to the scanned PDFs This week's book scan is a bit different from my usual fare. It's a manuscript, it's from the 15th century, it's not primarily related to suffering and - because of the limitations of OCR…
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…
I finally splashed out on a CZUR overhead scanner, which I picked up at a substantial discount from the regular market price. I strongly recommend anyyone to get one of these. Forget that dishwasher you were saving up for, or…
[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'll no doubt be back in gear with more insights into early modern suffering sometime during 2021, but for now I'm working on a series of videos on "Shakespeare the man". Here's the first one, just giving a general overview.…
Here it is! Something tangible and irrefutable, something that makes 2021 better than 2020 (not that that would be hard!), something to cheer the spirit and warm the cocckles of the heart. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership Phase…
The Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) is starting a new series of digital material. The first video in the series, Vegetable Harmonies, a short video with the Illuminations by Gherardo Cybo (1512-1600) on…
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,…
Edited, with thanks to Dr. Jonathan Oates for comments and corrections. One of the ironies of English history is that the landmark 1689 Bill of Rights, with its prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishment, was prompted, in part, by the…
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…
International Society for Intellectual History "The ISIH was created in 1994 to promote the study and teaching of intellectual history in all its forms and to foster communication and interaction among the global community of scholars in the field." Among…
Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England is a project funded by the ERC (European Research Council), exploring issues relating to strangers, travellers, migrants and so on. The website is an open-access resource consisting (at present) of some 40 essays contributed…
The University of Sussex is calling for participants to a Master Class on the History of Emotions, January 16-18, 2017. Click here for details.
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…
Death in Medieval Europe I haven't been keeping up with posts over the last few months - too many other things going on! I'll try to remedy that and catch up on interesting developments in the field (suppose I should…
"Jesus wept" - the shortest verse in the Bible (John 11:35) and the subject of a short piece on by Thomas Dixon on Umberto Eco and John Donne in the History of Emotions blog. The post makes the point that…
What does it mean to talk of "masochism" prior to the publication, in 1870, of Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz [Venus in furs], or of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's adoption of Masoch's name to describe the condition of deriving pleasure from pain…
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.…
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…
Last Christmas, a friend who happens to be an antiquarian bookseller posted on Facebook an image of what he took to be the first recorded instance of the expression "merry Christmas" in print. The book in question was An Itinerary…
A downloadable list of some of the most useful digital sources I've come across so far. Click here.
Archbishop #Laud supposedly dining on ears of Wllm Prynne! "Canterbury, his change of diot"1641 (Bod) #EarlyModern pic.twitter.com/BOe7FRu35t — Maia Newley (@MettaFilms) June 12, 2015 Under inverkan av specifikt fosfodiesteras typ 5 genomgår cGMP hydrolys, vilket leder till att erektionen upphör.…
A discourse community can be defined as having six clear characteristics: 1. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” 2. “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” 3. “A discourse community uses…
John Gray argues in The Guardian that Pinker's got his sums all wrong and there has been no decline in violence.
I'm happy to see that Google Books now gives a very generous preview of my book. Click here and check it out!
THE DEBATE over whether humanity is becoming less violent has its beginnings in Ted Robert Gurr's 1982 article "Historical trends in violent crime : a critical review of the evidence" (in Tonry and Morris, eds, Crime and Justice : an…
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…
Can we use the EEBO TCP database? This looks like a no-brainer - what would be the use of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership if we can't use it? - but it's actually something of a minefield.…
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…
(This post contains the substance of a presentation I gave at the Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Society of Japan in October, 2014.) For those who are not familiar, here is an introduction to the use of the Early English…
Harald Braun on the real victims of the gunpowder Plot - the vast majority of law-abiding English Catholics. Is there a lesson in this for modern times? Too right there is! And here's a little something from my early modern…
This is a PowerPoint presentation I made at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, Edmund Murray College, University of Cambridge, September 12th, 2014. It contains the gist of two recently-published papers, "The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to…
[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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
A couple of weeks ago I posted in answer to a question on Quora about whether there was such a thing as necessary suffering. I began by saying that in an age before anaesthetics this question could hardly even have…
I posted this a few months ago, but I'm having some trouble with spambots on a few of my posts, so I'm republishing with a slightly different permalink to see if that resolves the problem. Apologies to those who've already…
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…
[I posted this in 2014, but since so much of the EEBO TCP database came into the public domain in January 2015 I thought it worth updating.] For those who come to this blog from academia, this is probably a…
Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2002), makes the important point that 'the terms which constitute the heroics of endurance are precisely those terms used to construct the early modern idealization…
There is a frustrating ambiguity to Jeremy R. Carrette, 'Intense Exchange: Sadomasochism, Theology and the Politics of Late Capitalism' (theotherjournal.com, An Intersection of Theology and Culture, April 2, 2006). To some extent this is deliberate; Carrette wants to ‘refuse the…
The Beheading of Saint Agnes In early modern literature, the powerful, dominating female is frequently depicted as a temptress, an agent of evil, enticing her victims to ruination, but torment and destruction can come at the hands of…
Linda Tirado, Night Cook, Essayist, Activist, This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense Lots of pain here, not much pleasure, and a fine explanation of why decisions that may seem perverse or self-destructive make perfect sense to…
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), says '0f the Tatvs, or Gvinean Beast' that 'The Merchants as I haue herd and Cittizens of London keepe of these with their garden wormes', and in the following entry, 'Of…
Here is a useful little paper on early modern perceptions of the passions of Christ, originally published in Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy (Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 179-206:Christia…
There's some interesting detail on Victoria Buckley's blog about the calamitous events of November 5th, 1623, when nearly a hundred Catholics were killed after the floor gave way in a garret where between two and three hundred had assembled to…
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…
Far from originating in the Jamaican ska scene of the 1960s, rude boys (and girls) were flourishing in the seventeenth century, gaining particular note for their attacks on Quakers, to the extent that George Foxe recommended ‘that some Friends be…
This is wonderful!
In the seventeenth century most carrots were coloured purple!
Helen, King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Ashgate, 2013).This has only just come out, and I have not yet read it, but it looks as if it may turn out to be a significant…
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…
The History Blog has an amusing flow chart on medieval sex.
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…
Women's gossip about their sex lives in seventeenth-century England:Sex & The c17th City
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…
Rather than developing from native English discourses, the association of Catholicism with sexual flagellation in late seventeenth-century England is mainly a product of the same southern/Latin/Catholic culture that produced the lives of the saints. Most of the same ingredients as…
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…
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…
Perversely pleasurable history of pain, written by Christina Koning (reviewer for The Times).
Krafft-Ebing’s derivation of sadism and masochism from the names of Sade and Sacher-Masoch (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie, 1886; edition used, 1894, p. 11) may not be fully analogous to Freud’s appropriation of the name of Oedipus,…
Saint Jerome tells a queer story of a Christian captured by the Romans. To destroy his soul, rather than his body he was (as the Catholic translation of 1630 has it) taken and … led aside into a most delicious…
REVIEW: "Penance and Repentance" by Eamonn Vincent
REVIEW: "Breaking new ground in history of sexuality" by Joseph O'Leary.
Unlike Catholic suffering, which (at least in its monastic context, where penance went hand in hand with chastity) was frequently overtly linked with sexuality, Protestant suffering generally relates to sex only obliquely. Whereas, for example, Anthony of Padua’s biographer explicitly…
Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci, eds, Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (Rodopi, 2011) I must admit, I haven't read this yet, but I find the concept interesting. As the promotional blurb…
Another political post, that has nothing (much) to do with the seventeenth century (except, perhaps, insofar as 'plus ça change...'). I'm not planning to make a habit of posts like these - I just want to get it off my…
I'm sorry, but this post can hardly avoid being political! The degree of cruelty and sheer nastiness that one finds in seventeenth-century discourse is connected, in part, with the extent to which pain was publicly inflicted. Whole families might gather…
Discourses of Suffering, already published in hardback, is now available on Kindle.
During the seventeenth century, there were more than a hundred Catholic editions in English of exemplary lives of saints and other holy people, most of which emphasize a willingness – amounting sometimes to what appears to be a compulsion –…
A public domain thesis on the effect of witnessing scenes of people in distant places suffering in the media:Maria Kyriakidou, Watching the Pain of Others: Audience Discourses of Distant Suffering in Greece. This thesis can also be viewed here.
There's a good blog on the history of emotions here. It contains an interesting review of Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a work which I had not previously come across.
Here is a link to a PDF file placed in the public domain by Christia Mercer, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College. Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz and Anne Conway Mercer also has a chapter in…
BLOG HOME Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 1995; paperback, 1996) This book gives a fascinating account of the beginnings of scientific rationalism and the way in which the body came to be…
These images, illustrating passages from John Cleland's Fanny Hill, date from 1766. Although such practices were described in 17th-century literature, it was not until the 18th century that they came to be represented graphically.Foucault's claims about the frankness and tolerance…
Just when you think you know something someone comes along and turns it all upside down! There I was - along with pretty much everyone else who'd bothered to give the matter a second thought - all cocooned in my…
BLOG HOME Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (OUP, 2012). Another publication that falls geographically outside the scope of my own work, but is thematically very much…
BLOG HOME Dominique Bouhours (The Life of St. Ignatius, London, 1686, pp. 64–5) recounts how Ignatius, wandering between the French and Spanish armies, is suspected of being a spy and apprehended by some Spanish soldiers:They stript him, and carried him…
BLOG HOME 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…
BLOG HOME Rubens The Feast of Achelous 1615Misconceptions about Epicureanism were rife during the early modern period. The most deep-rooted and persistent misconception of all was the equation of Epicureanism with hedonism. Despite the sixteenth-century ‘“rehabilitation” of Epicurus by Valla,…
BLOG HOMEToulalan'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…
BLOG HOMEDespite institutionalized punishments that most people today would consider to be cruel, emphasis on compassion - a heartfelt assertion that ‘true Christians haue compassion towards their enemies’ (Thomas Wilson, Saints by Calling: or Called to be Saints, London, 1620,…
BLOG HOMEAnn 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…
BLOG HOMEJan 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…
BLOG HOME Montaigne, describing a public execution he witnessed while in Rome, expresses his horror at the cruelty of those whoinvent vnused tortures and vnheard-off torments; to devise new and vnknowne deathes, and that in colde blood, without any former…
BLOG HOMEThis 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…
BLOG HOMEOf all the modern scholarship I consulted in the writing of my own book (Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England), Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (OUP,…
BLOG HOME As the nameless and disreputable-looking lady above and the Duchess of Monmouth below attest, the radical option was simply to go without! Find out more here.
BLOG HOME On the 25th of January, 1661, Samuel Pepys ‘went to the Theatre, where I saw again “The Lost Lady,” which do now please me better than before; and here I sitting in a dark place, a lady spit…
BLOG HOMEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a137M0FQWK8Mary Wroth's Urania (London, 1621) poses profound problems for feminist critics; here we have the first major full-length work of fiction in English by a woman and it contains some of the most graphically sadomasochistic scenes of male domination…
BLOG HOME Foucault analyses modern sexual identities as social constructs of fairly recent (mainly nineteenth-century) origin. He contends that, 'At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was still a certain frankness. Sexual practices were hardly kept secret ... people…