The evils of technology
If you try to follow links to the main website (Discourses of Suffering main site), you will notice that they don’t currently work. An installation of WordPress on the main site conflicted with the blog, which is also a WordPress site, with disastrous consequences. I’m hoping the host provider is going to be able to […]
All you ever wanted to know about the Reformation…
… in one 15-minute video!
Upcoming conference
The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450-1800. Contested Ideals, Controversial Spaces, and Suspicious Objects. In: H-Soz-Kult, 21.02.2021, <www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-95973>. The conference runs from August 26-28, 2021.
Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away…] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century […]
Masochism and Anachronism
What does it mean to talk of “masochism” prior to the publication, in 1870, of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz [Venus in furs], or of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s adoption of Masoch’s name to describe the condition of deriving pleasure from pain in Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie [Sexual psychopathy: a clinical / forensic study]? Rob Boddice’s […]
Surgical Implements
A couple of weeks ago I posted in answer to a question on Quora about whether there was such a thing as necessary suffering. I began by saying that in an age before anaesthetics this question could hardly even have been asked. I then went on, in my wonted fashion, to discuss the issue in […]
Discourses of Suffering on Facebook
While I post all the really serious stuff right here on the blog, there are quite a lot of things I don’t feel quite fit here but make for a good post on Facebook. If you don’t already, check Discourses of Suffering on Facebook for tidbits and fun stuff!