On the Treatment of Pain
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 to the former, is Daniel S. Goldberg on ‘The History of Pain’ [UPDATE: Goldberg’s piece […]
Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature
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 of women: patient suffering, mildness, humility, chastity, loyalty and obedience. Contending that the heroics of […]
Christia Mercer, Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G.W. Leibniz and Anne Conway
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 Mercer, ‘Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy’.
New Book on Early Modern Perceptions of the Male and Female Body
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 contribution to early modern gender studies. Since a large part of my own work […]
Forthcoming book on Pain
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 period.
Alec Ryrie on Suffering among Early Modern Protestants
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 answer in relation to the early modern Protestant the question the little boy at the […]
Germans as Victims
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 has it, ‘The focus of this interdisciplinary volume is both on the historical roots of […]
Watching the suffering of others
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.
Christia Mercer on suffering and sympathy
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 Sympathy: A History (OUP, 2015). The links are valid at the time of posting; if […]
Dissection and anatomy
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 seen as a kind of machine, with a wide array of sources ranging from the […]