Main description:

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. The volume's two-fold approach to the hurt body, defining 'hurt' from the perspectives of both victim and beholder - as well as their combined creation of a gaze - is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of 'cruel' viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims' bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim's presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look - the transmitted 'pain' experienced by the watching audience.

Contents:

Introduction - Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck Part I: Performing bodies 1. Spectacle and martyrdom: bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) - Christian Biet 2. The Massacre of the Innocents: infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries - Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt 3. To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body - Karel Vanhaesebrouck Part II: Beholders 4. 'I feel your pain': some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain - Jonathan Sawday 5. Masochism and the female gaze - John Yamamoto-Wilson 6. Epicurean tastes: towards a French eighteenth-century criticism of the image of pain - Tomas Macsotay 7. Wounding realities and 'painful excitements': real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke's sublime - Aris Sarafianos 8. Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641-53 - Nicolas Kwiatkowski Part III: Institutions 9. Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis: Frans-Willem Korsten 10. Palermo's past public executions and their lingering memory - Maria Pia Di Bella 11. The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices 1600-1750 - Inger Leemans Epilogue - Javier Moscoso Index