Pain, Pleasure and Perversity on Google Books
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The Terrifying Coldness of St. 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 the virtuous as easily as at those of the wicked. A man loses his head to the righteous Judith just […]
Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica and the Beginnings of the Pornography of Pain
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 are to be found in English writings – political and/or religious polemic, increasingly frank accounts […]
“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 […]
The Genealogy of Masochism
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, but still less can the relationship between Sade and Sacher-Masoch and their creations be compared […]
The Dominatrix in Early Modern Times
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 garden & there in the middest of pure lyllies, and blushing roses, (where also a […]
Homoeroticism in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
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 traces the saint’s determination to eradicate sexual desire by means of ever more severe mortification […]
Suffering Saints
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 – to suffer pain and degradation, in conjunction with avowals of chastity and a rejection of […]
Sexual flagellation in early modern times
Then we invest in the concept of beauty when we talk about a woman? Is she limited to regular facial features, a fashionable wardrobe, bright makeup https://beautypositive.org/ and a chiseled figure? Of course not. It doesn’t matter what size of clothes you wear, whether your hair is long or what color your eyes are, the main […]
Ignatius Loyola
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 in his shirt to their Captain. The Remembrance of Jesus Christ, expos’d naked to the Eyes […]