Early modern studies: Ebooks
BLOG HOME It’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 working on the early modern period. Last summer, I was back in the University […]
Early Modern Digital Humanities
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 please let me know if there’s anything you feel should be included.
The hurt(ful) body
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 this blog! Nothing could illustrate that more clearly than the fact that this book came […]
Death in Medieval Europe
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 make that my New Year’s resolution!). Anyway, here’s a new publication that may be of […]
The Civilizing Process and the Decline of Violence
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 Annual Review of Research). Several other studies, mainly based on homicide data from Scandinavia and […]
Two new books on the history of pain
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 Mocoso, Paolo Santangelo, David Biro, Joanna Bourke, Wilfried Witte, Nouémi Tousignant, Sheeny Cully, Liz Gray […]
Torture and the Art of Holy Dying
[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 Modern England (John Hopkins, 2010), which she is currently working up for publication with Yale […]
Two Recent Books on Gender and Violence in the Early Modern Period
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 pressure; the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared. Here, original essays analyze a […]
The Sufferings of the Martyrs and the Transgressive Female Gaze
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, but which I have only just come across. (The link, by the way, is to […]
On Placebos
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 about placebos, and their place in the history of the perception of pain, and Rosenberg […]