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
BLOG HOME 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, […]
“Hudibras” and the Puritan Mindset
BLOG HOME If matrimony and hanging goBy 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 […]
The Genealogy of Masochism
BLOG HOME 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 […]
The Dominatrix in Early Modern Times
BLOG HOME 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 […]
Homoeroticism in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
BLOG HOME 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 […]
Suffering Saints
BLOG HOME The Penitent Saint Jerome, Lorenzo Lotto, c. 1513 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, […]
Sexual flagellation in early modern times
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 of early modern discourse (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité 1: La Volonté de […]
Humiliation, Ignatius Loyola and the suffering of Christ
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 in his shirt to their Captain. The Remembrance of Jesus Christ, expos’d naked to […]