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). Â 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 […]
The Sex Lives of Saints
BLOG HOME This is another book I found very useful in my work on early modern attitudes towards suffering. Virgina Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), discusses the saints of the early Christian period, but it got me thinking about how the accounts of these saints were received in the […]
Recommended Reading: _Erotic Subjects_
BLOG HOME Of all the modern scholarship I consulted in the writing of my own book (Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England), Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2011) was probably the one I liked best. Admittedly, my reasons for liking it […]