John Bunyan and the Acceptable Sacrifice
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 the metaphorical ‘rod’ of his Lord for the sake of the salvation of his soul. […]
Epicureanism and sedition
BLOG HOME Rubens The Feast of Achelous 1615 Misconceptions 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, Erasmus, Ficino, and Landino (among others)’, and the fact that ‘Montaigne and Burton among […]
Loving one’s enemies
BLOG HOME Despite 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, p. 386) – is one of the salient features of seventeenth-century Protestant discourse. Richard […]
The Spectacle of Suffering
BLOG HOME Montaigne, describing a public execution he witnessed while in Rome, expresses his horror at the cruelty of those who invent vnused tortures and vnheard-off torments; to devise new and vnknowne deathes, and that in colde blood, without any former enmitie or quarrel, or without any gaine or profit; and onely to this […]
On Mary Wroth’s Urania
BLOG HOME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a137M0FQWK8 Mary 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 and female submission that the seventeenth century has to offer. ‘What, then, to […]
On Sexual Flagellation
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 had a certain tolerant familiarity with the illicit’ (Histoire de la Sexualité 1: La Volonté […]
Suffering in the Seventeenth Century
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