The Hurt(Ful) Body

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 volumes 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 with the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victims presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look the transmitted pain experienced by the watching audience. -- .