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 […]
Using the Early English Books Online and Text Creation Partnership Databases
(This post contains the substance of a presentation I gave at the Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Society of Japan in October, 2014.) For those who are not familiar, here is an introduction to the use of the Early English Books Online database (EEBO): EEBO requires a log-in, but many – if not most – […]
Protestant Reception of Catholic Literature
This is a PowerPoint presentation I made at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, Edmund Murray College, University of Cambridge, September 12th, 2014. It contains the gist of two recently-published papers, “The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700” (Recusant History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2014), pp. 67-89), and “Robert Persons’s Resolution (1582) […]
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 […]
Masochism in Political Behaviour
A few months ago I commented on Jeremy Carrette’s essay, ‘Intense Exchange: Sadomasochism, Theology and the Politics of Late Capitalism’, expressing frustration at the way in which the author speaks of the need to ‘free our gendered bodies from the market of global exploitation’, but refuses to commit himself to identifying sadomasochism either as part […]
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 […]
Catching Up…
The last couple of months have been pretty hectic and I haven’t had much time to post here, so let me give a brief rundown of recent developments. First, let me start with the stuff I’m missing out on, being here in Japan. I was sorry to miss a roundtable discussion on Violence, Victimhood and […]
Disturbingly erotic…or not?
I posted this a few months ago, but I’m having some trouble with spambots on a few of my posts, so I’m republishing with a slightly different permalink to see if that resolves the problem. Apologies to those who’ve already seen it! An art historian is claiming that Dürer’s work is deeply erotic, in […]
“Necessary” suffering
I posted this on Quora, in answer to someone who wanted to know if there is such a thing as necessary suffering. To see the complete thread, click here (you’ll need to create a log-in ID if you want to add comments). In an age before anaesthetics this question could hardly even have been asked. […]
Researching the Seventeenth Century Online: Tools of the Trade
[I posted this in 2014, but since so much of the EEBO TCP database came into the public domain in January 2015 I thought it worth updating.] For those who come to this blog from academia, this is probably a post you can skip, but for people in other walks of life I thought it […]