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’.
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 […]
Christia Mercer on suffering and sympathy
BLOG HOME 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 […]
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 […]
Suffering in Early Modern Germany
BLOG HOME Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (OUP, 2012). Another publication that falls geographically outside the scope of my own work, but is thematically very much on-topic. Rittgers emphasizes Protestant patience in accepting suffering as part of God’s will, but – […]
Toulalan, Imagining Sex
BLOG HOME Toulalan’s book gives a fairly comprehensive insight into attitudes towards sex in the seventeenth century, building on the insights gained by works like Ian Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (OUP, 2000), but I have a fair few criticisms. Toulalan assumes that Foucault got it right in saying that, at […]
The Art of Suffering
BLOG HOME Ann Thompson, The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-Century Anti-Providential Thought (Ashgate, 2003). This book gives a useful insight into the decline of the ‘art of suffering’ in the seventeenth century. As Thompson explains, during the earlier part of the century, writers like Richard Rogers, Paul Baynes, John Downame, Henry […]
Pain and Compassion
BLOG HOME Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (D.S. Brewer, 2012) This came out after I had submitted my manuscript to the publishers, and I was therefore not able to make use of it in my own work. However, Dijkhuizen wrote ‘Religious Meanings of Pain in Early […]