The hurt(ful) body: Performing and beholding pain, 1600–1800

Figures

0.1 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), p. 41.

0.2 Pieter Bruegel the elder, Massacre of the Innocents, 1565. Oil on panel, 109.2 × 158.1 cm. Windsor Castle, Royal Collection Trust. Image © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 RCIN 405787.

0.3 Lucas van Valckenborch (attributed), The Massacre of the Innocents, 1586. Oil on panel, 76.6 × 108.1 cm. Madrid, Thyssen-Boremisza inv. no. 414 (1956.10).

2.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1610. Oil on panel, 142 × 182 cm. Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Thomson Collection © Art Gallery of Ontario. AGOID.106855.

2.2 Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1638. Oil on panel, 199 × 302 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Inv. nr. 572. Image © Alte Pinakothek München/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

2.3 Phillips Galle, after Frans Floris (I), Massacre of the Innocents, second half sixteenth century. Engraving published by Hieronymus Cock, 32.8 cm × 41.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

2.4 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Massacre of the Innocents, 1590. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

2.5 Crispijn van den Queborn after Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Massacre of the Innocents, 1637. Engraving, 10.0 cm × 13.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-73.343.

4.1 Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, sick, c. 1509–11. Pen in brown ink, some passages in aquarelle, 11.8 × 10.8 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen, Inv.-No. 1851/50. Kunsthalle Bremen – Kupferschkabine – Der Kunstverein in Bremen. Photo: Karen Blindow.

5.1 Johannes Sadeler I after Bartholomeus Spranger, Phyllis riding Aristotle, sixteenth century. Engraving 27.2 × 21.6 cm. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953, Metropolitan Museum of Art 53.601.10(25) (www.metmuseum.org).

6.1 Pierre Subleyras, Charon Ferrying Souls, c. 1735–40. Oil on canvas, 135 × 83 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

6.2 Cornélis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Vision of Hell, 1655. Engraving, 27 × 18 cm, in De Marolles, Temple des Muses, no. XXI.

6.3 Pierre Puget, Milon of Crotona, 1682. Marble, 270 × 140 × 80 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo by the author.

6.4 Cornelis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Palais du sommeil, 1655. Engraving, 27 × 18 cm, in De Marolles, Temple des Muses, no. LVIII.

6.5 Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1612–1614. Oil on panel, 421 × 311 cm (centre panel), 421 × 153 cm (wings). Antwerp, O.-L. Vrouwekathedraal. Photo by the author.

6.6 Gabriel-François Doyen, The Miracle of St Anthony's Fire, 1767. Oil on canvas, 665 × 450 cm. Church of Saint-Roch, Paris. Photo by the author.

6.7 Jean Honoré Fragonard, The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe, 1765. Oil on canvas, preliminary study. Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Reproduced by courtesy of Mercedes Gonzalez Amenzúa, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.

6.8 Filippo Juvarra and Pierre Legros, Cappella Antamori, c. 1708–1710. Church of San Girolamo della Carità, Rome. Photo by the author.

7.1 Laocoon and his Sons, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. LivioAndronico and Notwist / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0.

7.2 Laocoon, illustration from Charles Bell, Essay on the Anatomy of Expression (London, 1806), p. 112.

7.3 Charles Bell, drawing no. 4, Soldier Suffering from Head Wound (and Shock?) 1815. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0.

7.4 Charles Bell, drawing no. 14, Soldier with Right Arm Missing, 1815, Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0.

7.5 Charles Bell, drawing no. 13, Soldier suffering from open chest wound, head and right arm bandaged. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0.

7.6 Charles Bell, Soldier suffering from a stomach wound to abdomen. Wounded at the battle of Waterloo. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0.

7.7 Charles Bell, Soldier with missing arm, lying on his side, grasping a rope, inscribed ‘XIII, Waterloo …’, 11 August 1815. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0.

8.1 James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland. Wherein is lively presented as in a map a list of the unheard of cruelties and perfidious treacheries of blood thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction (London: 1642), p. 41. © The British Library Board, G.5557.

8.2 Anonymous, Le Miroir de la Cruelle & horrible Tyrannie Espagnole perpétrée au Pays Bas par le Tyran Duc de Albe (Amsterdam, 1620), p. 51.

8.3 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), p. 53. © The British Library Board, G.20235.

9.1 Lieve Verschuier, The Keelhauling, according to Tradition, of the Ship's Doctor of Admiral Jan van Nes [Het kielhalen, volgens overlevering, van de scheepschirurgijn van admiraal Jan van Nes], between 1660 and 1686. Oil painting. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

9.2 Rembrandt, ‘Abraham caresses Isaac’ (‘Jacob caresses Benjamin’), 1635–39. 116 mm × 89 mm, etch – print. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

10.1 Engraving from La pia opera delle anime dei corpi decollate. 27.5 × 25.5 cm. Collezione Cocchiara (p. 67, n. 185). Museo Etnografico Siciliano Giuseppe Pitrè, Palermo. Photo by the author from Giuseppe Cocchiara, Le immagini devote del popolo siciliano (Palermo, Sellerio Editore, 1982), p. 182.

10.2 Francesco Cichè, ‘Seconda promessa’, print no. 46, with a representation of the auto-de-fe celebrated in Palermo, 6 April 1724, from Antonino Mongitore, L'atto pubblico di fede (Palermo: Agostino e Antonino Epiro, 1724), with copper engravings from Francesco Cichè after Peolo Amato, Antonio Grano and Mario Cordua.

10.3 The cippo set up in Palermo on Corso dei Mille, corner Piazza Decollati [Ponte delle teste mozze (Bridge of the Severed Heads)]. Courtesy of Paolo Fabio Ceraulo (palermonascosta.blogspot.com).

10.4 The same cippo adorned with candles. Courtesy of Paolo Fabio Ceraulo (palermonascosta.blogspot.com).

11.1 Anonymous engraving, ‘Desperate traders in the exchange of Amsterdam / The Wind traders are paid with wind, if the last will still hang’ [‘Wanhopige handelaren in de beurs van Amsterdam / De Wind Koopers met Wind betaald, of de laaste zal blyven hangen']. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.504.

11.2 Anonymous engraving, ‘Apollo's sentence over the bubbles’ [‘Vonnis van Apollo over de Bubbels'], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.560.

11.3 Anonymous engraving, ‘Greed attempts to overtake Fortune’ [‘Hebzucht probeert Fortuna in the halen'], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.576.

11.4 Bernard Picart, ‘Monument to posterity in remembrance of the incredible folly of the year 1720’ [‘Monument ter herinnering aan de dwaasheid van het jaar 1720’/'Monument consacré a la posterité en memoire de la folie incroyable de la XX. année du XVIII. Siecle'], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-51.221.

11.5 Anonymous engraving, ‘Harlequin as a shareholder’ [‘Harlekijn Actionist / Arlequyn Actionist'], 1720. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1944-2134.

11.6 Anonymous engraving, ‘Allegory on the black bankruptcies as a result of the wind trade in the Amsterdam exchange’ / ‘In remembrance of the fickle wonder year 1763’ [‘Allegorie op de zware bankroeten door de windhandel aan de Amsterdamse beurs’ / ‘Ter Nagedagtenis van het Wisselvallig wonder Jaar 1763’. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-84.582.

11.7 Anonymous engraving, ‘Rise and Fall of the Shareholders’ [‘Op- en Ondergang van de Actionisten'], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. RP-P-OB-83.511.

11.8 Anonymous engraving, ‘Mississipi, the land of gold famed for the wind trade’ [‘Het door de windnegotie befaamde goudland Mississippi, 1720 / Mississippi, of ‘t Wyd-befaamde Goud-land, door de Inbeelding der Wind-negotie']. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.580.

11.9 Anonymous engraving, ‘Battle between the Feasting Bubble Lords and the Coming Hardship’ [‘Strijd tussen de windhandel en de aanstaande armoede, 1720 / Stryd tuszen de Smullende Bubbel Heeren, en de Aanstaande Armoede']. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.534.

11.10 Anonymous engraving, ‘The stonecutter of 1720 / Many have the stone in their head / because people believe in wind’ [‘De keisnijder van 1720' . ‘ By veele zit de kei in't hooft / om dat men in de wind gelooft']. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.513.

11.11 Anonymous engraving, ‘The greedy world, 1720 / Reflexion on the greedy world, from the outset rise and fall of the stock market’ [‘De geldzuchtige wereld, 1720 / Bespiegeling voor de geld zugtige wereld, in ‘t begin op- en ondergang van den actiehandel']. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.465.

11.12 Anonymous engraving, ‘The world is a theatre, each plays his part and gets his due’ [‘De Waereld is een Speel Toneel, elk speeld zyn rol en krygt zyn deel'], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.526.

11.13 Emblematic print on the South Sea Bubble by Thomas Cook, 1800, after a design by William Hogarth. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.604.

11.14 Anonymous engraving, ‘Disastrous consequences of the stock trade, 1720. The spirit of the resurrected Heraclitus screams over the laughing stock of Democritus’ [‘Rampzalige gevolgen van de actiehandel, 1720. De geest van den verreesene Heerakliet schryjend over de Lagh-stof van Demokriet']. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1939-530.

List of contributors

Maria Pia Di Bella is a researcher in social anthropology and a member of the Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux (Sciences sociales, Politique, Santé) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. She is also currently research affiliate at Harvard Divinity School. She has published monographs on popular religion and cultures of punishment and penitence, including La Pura verità. Discarichi di conscienza intesi dai Bianchi (1999), Dire ou taire en Sicile (2008) and Essai sur les supplices. L'état de victime (2011). She has edited, among others, Vols et sanctions en Méditerranée (1998) and, with James Elkins, Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (2012). Since 2011 she works on street memorials in Berlin concerning the victims of genocide and the function of these memorials as ‘symbolic reparations’.

Christian Biet is a professor in History and Theory of Theatre, as well as in French studies at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense and at the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also a regular visiting Professor at NYU and Florsheimer distinguished fellow, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, NY. Recent book publications include Henry IV, la vie, la légende (2000), Qu'est-ce que le théâtre (with Christophe Triau, 2006) and Le théâtre français du XVIIe siècle (with Romain Jobez, 2009). He co-edited two volumes on early modern French theatre: Théâtre cruel et récits sanglants français (din XVIe–début XVIIe) (together with Pierre Frantz, 2006) and Tragédies et récits de martyres en France (2009).

Stijn Bussels is lecturer in Art and Theatre History at Leiden University. His research focuses on northern Europe in the early modern period. From 2013 until 2018, he is the Principal Instigator of the ERC starting grant programme ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam’. He has written two monographs: The Antwerp Entry of Prince Philip in 1549: Rhetoric, Performance and Power (2012) and The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (2012).

Frans-Willem Korsten holds the chair by special appointment Literature and Society at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and is associate professor at the department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University. He is the author of Sovereignty as Inviolability: Vondel's Theatrical Explorations in the Dutch Republic (2009) and co-editor of the standard reference work Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age (2012). He was Director of Education of LUCAS, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society where he established the Center for Art, Literature and Law. He was responsible for the NWO internationalisation programme ‘Post-autonomia and Precarity – the Global Heritage’ (2010–14) and cooperates in the combined NWO-FWO project ‘Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period’. He has published on baroque art and political theory, especially with regard to sovereignty, and on the role of art and literature at the limits of law.

Nicolás Kwiatkowski studied History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and earned his PhD at the same institution, with a thesis on the idea of history in Early Modern England. He has enjoyed research scholarships in Italy (Università degli Studi di Cagliari, 2014; where he also was guest professor in 2015), the United States (Fulbright Commission and Harvard University, 2009) and Germany (Freie Universität, Berlin, 2012; DAAD, 2015). His latest book is Tomiris. Reina de los masagetas, (2016). He currently teaches Problems of Cultural History at the University of San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, and works as Associate Researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET), Argentina.

Inger Leemans is Professor of Cultural History at VU University, Amsterdam, and director of the Graduate School of Humanities. She has written extensively about the history of Dutch literature, about early modern pornography and the (radical) Enlightenment. Her interest in cultural economics has resulted in research about censorship, journalism, literary criticism and the literary ‘bubble’ that accompanied the financial bubble of 1720. Her publications include a textbook on eighteenth-century Dutch literature Worm en Donder co-written with Gert-Jan Johannes (2013). Inger Leemans is one of the founders and directors of ACCESS, The Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies. Currently, she is working on Emotional Economies – a cultural history of stock trade from the perspective of the history of emotions. Together with Kornee van der Haven, Karel Vanhaesebrouck and Frans-Willem Korsten, she coordinates a project on the ‘imagineering’ of violence in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

Tomas Macsotay is an art and cultural historian specialising in the history of European sculpture in the eighteenth century. Between 2009 and 2014, he was a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, and held a post-doctoral Marie Curie grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His books include The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris Académie (2014), and the edited collection Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital (2016) and (as co-editor) Morceaux. Die bildhauerischen Aufnahmestücke europäischer Kunstakademien im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (2016). His work has appeared in a number of international refereed journals, including Intersections, Oxford Art Journal and Journal of Modern Craft. Macsotay currently holds a Ramón y Cajal tenure track position at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). His Pain: A Cultural History, was published in Spanish (2011) and in English (2012) and the French version won the 2015 Livres-à-nous prize in the category of History. Moscoso is now involved in the history of ambition. His next book, Broken Promises: The Historical Sources of Indignation, will be published in 2017. He was visiting professor at the University of Chicago for the second semester of 2016.

Cornelis van der Haven is Assistant Professor at Ghent University in the field of early modern Dutch literature. He studied Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and wrote a dissertation about the institutional dynamics of early modern theatre repertoires in the context of urban culture. He has published widely on the history of Dutch and German theatre and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a strong focus on the role of literary texts in shaping cultural and social identities.

Bram Van Oostveldt is Lecturer in Theatre History and Theory at Amsterdam University. He has worked extensively on the theatre in eighteenth-century France and the Austrian Netherlands, producing, among other publications, the monograph Tranen om het alledaagse: Diderot en het verlangen naar natuurlijkheid in het Brusselse theaterleven in de achttiende eeuw (2013). Currently he works as a senior researcher in French seventeenth-century theatre and theatricality in the ERC starting grant programme ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam’ at Leiden University.

Aris Sarafianos is currently Assistant Professor in European Art History at the University of Ioannina, Greece. He has taught at the University of Manchester (2001–06) and he has held various research fellowships at the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Clark Library/Centre for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, UCLA, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, the YCBA at Yale University and the Wellcome Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the extensive interactions between the history of medicine and art history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed publications, including the Journal of the History of Ideas, Representations, Art History, Art Bulletin, Comparative Critical Studies, as well as featuring in a series of theme-based edited volumes of essays dealing with the intersections of science, medicine, literature and the arts.

Jonathan Sawday holds the Walter J. Ong Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University, English Department. His publications include: Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007), co-edited with Neil Rhodes, and The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (2000). His research is focused on the intersection between science, technology and literature, particularly (but not exclusively) in the early modern period. Currently he is working on the idea of blanks or voids in literature, art and culture.

Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the MA programme ‘Arts du spectacle vivant’. Vanhaesebrouck also works as a theory lecturer at the Brussels-based film and theatre school RITCS, the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound of the Erasmus University College. His book publications include: Spectacle et justice. Regards croisés sur le système pénal en Belgique (with Christine Guillain and Yves Cartuyvels, 2005) and Theater. Een visuele geschiedenis (with Thomas Crombez, Jelle Koopmans, Frank Peeters and Luk Van den Dries, 2005).

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson is interested in translation issues, particularly relating to Protestant editions of Catholic works during the early modern period, and his main research focus has been on the Protestant reception of Catholic literature in seventeenth-century England. His monograph, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England (2013), springs from a study of differences between early modern Catholic and Protestant discourse on the subject of suffering. He spent a number of years in Spain before moving to Japan, where he lives with his wife and child and teaches in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo.

Introduction

Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck

In his infamous Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis¹ the Catholic priest Richard Verstegan takes his reader immediately to the heart of the matter: his book is an accumulation of gruesome and hyperviolent scenes of Protestant ‘heretics’ slowly and sadistically – that must have been, indeed, the underlying message – putting to death an endless series of Catholic martyrs. Bodies are grilled, opened up, dismembered, decapitated, eviscerated, hanged and even eaten. Think of any possible physical cruelty or any type of violence and it is represented – maybe ‘staged’ might be a more accurate verb – in Verstegan's book. For example, in one of the pictures² which Verstegan included in a series under the self-evident title ‘The horrible cruelties of the French Huguenots’ one can discern three topical scenes, each of them set apart by a clear scenographic division, which reminds us of the compartmentalisation of Flemish altarpieces. The image recounts how in Angoulême thirty Catholics were confined in the house of a bourgeois called Papin and were set to death through three different types of gruesome torture. On the front right three Huguenots try to cut a body in two, by moving it back and forth across a tightly bended rope (for sure, a crueller death than being cut in two by a sword). Through the two windows of the same indefinite space we see how, in the perspectival distance, five bodies are being burnt on a bale fire. On the left of the print, through an opened door, the remaining martyrs are being starved to death and are left no choice other than to eat one another, eventually dying from hunger. The picture is designed for our eyes to wander across the scenes, from one topical stage to the other, thus giving a temporal dimension to different activities taking place at the same time.

0.1 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp 1587), p. 41

For the reader's convenience, Verstegan added letters to different scenes, which in their turn refer to explicative legends on the right page. A similar spatio-temporal organisation is to be found in nearly all of the images. In another, even gorier, composition Verstegan brings together events that supposedly took place in different cities (Figure 0.1).³ In the far right corner two Protestants roll up on a wooden stick the intestines of an opened-up corpse of a Catholic martyr. The scene clearly refers to the agony of Saint Erasmus of Formia (one century earlier Dirk Bouts had already evoked this gruesome scene for his altarpiece in Saint Peter's Church in Leuven and it was later taken up again by Nicolas Poussin). In the middle of the picture, a priest is being buried alive, and at the far end, near the horizon, the slaughterers are cutting to pieces with their swords ‘the little children of the Catholics’.⁴ In the left corner the most spectacular scene is taking place: ‘In the city of Mans, they [the Huguenots] took a very old man, cut off his private parts, grilled them and then forced him to eat them. And to see how he digested his own private parts, they opened up his stomach, while he was still alive, and thus put him to death.’ The fire underneath the grill iron is still burning, the poor man is looking upward, his body opened up, calmly waiting for his death.

Even though the depicted scenes are extremely violent and gory, no blood is to be seen, none of the martyrs seems to be crying out loudly from pain, let alone living their agony in an outspoken way. They seem to be calm, passive, even patient, as true martyrs, who know that with death comes salvation. However, the torturers seem to be excited and their grimaces either suggest that their cruelty is demanding a great effort or seem to evoke their true, perverse nature. Verstegan's book has a clear aim – stigmatising the actual or supposed crimes of Protestant ‘heretics’ – and therefore uses a logic of accumulation, both in a linear, diachronic (one picture after the other throughout the book) and in a synchronic way, by using the principle of what one could call vertical montage or rotational exposition: the onlooker is invited to have his eyes hover over the picture where different events, which originally took place at different moments, are depicted in one single image.

Verstegan's Theatrum Crudelitatum is a very outspoken example of the issues at stake in this book: the violence (of any possible nature) inflicted on bodies and the representation of this very same violence, in theatres, in pictures and paintings but also in non-artistic modes of representation. Verstegan depicts Europe as a religious and moral wasteland, with man wandering around in this universe of atrocities and existential uncertainties, a universe both cruel and spectacular. Of course, Verstegan had straightforward propaganda aims with his book (i.e. showing the savagery of the other as a legitimisation for one's own acts of violence). Indeed, the rhetorical principle of accumulation was, of course, driven by an outspoken didactic agenda, as Frank Lestringant explains in his introduction to the French edition: ‘The book aims at a rhetorical effect of accumulation […] far more striking than the incessant variation is its repetition, in its dry and inexorable monotony. The story has been reduced to its most simple expression. The places, the actors, the tortures follow one another without an interruption whatsoever, not throughout the book and not within the picture itself.’⁵ But, at the same time, Verstegan's book also demonstrates how early modern popular imagination was permeated by violence and how the visual, literary or theatrical representation of violence not only functioned as a contemporary lieu de mémoire that allowed people to commemorate the atrocities they lived through or heard about, but also responded to an outspoken eagerness to actually see these violent acts represented. It is, of course, no coincidence that Verstegan, like many of his contemporaries, uses the baroque metaphor of the theatrum mundi as the general frame for his work, in which violence – real or fictional – is literally staged, thus willingly obscuring the distinction between real atrocities and their representations.

The hurt(ful) body in three stages

Verstegan's Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis thus takes us to the very heart of The Hurt(ful) Body as he (literally) gives centre-stage to representations of pain and suffering, while having a clear performative effect in mind, as he aimed at provoking a direct impact on the mind and body of the onlooker, without, however, losing sight of the spectacular potential of the depicted scenes. 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. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The volume offers a twofold approach to the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze). It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and juxtaposing 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.

The structure of The Hurt(ful) Body reflects the double perspective on pain and suffering, as the first part of the book focuses mainly on performing bodies (on stage), whereas the second part discusses the pain of someone who watches the suffering of others, both in regard to theatre audiences and beholders of art, as well as to the onlooker in art: the theatre character or individual on canvas who is watching a(nother) hurt body. The third and final part analyses how this circulation of gazes and affects functions within a specific institutional context, paying particular interest to the performative context of public space. However, the reader will notice that a number of concepts and questions systematically pop up throughout these three different parts, as all of the chapters aim to understand, on the basis of concrete case studies and specific historical material, the complicated interferences between agents, onlookers, performative routines and specific contexts. The three parts function as ‘lenses’ enabling the reader to approach similar problems by taking a different perspective on the same historical reality, which will prove to be, just as any other reality – historical or not – being put on the historian's dissection table, messy and complicated. As we will explain later in this introduction, the three parts do not constitute clear-cut, neatly defined packages, clearly different from one another. They provide different frameworks but often reiterate similar questions, in the hope of reaching out for a nuanced understanding of the complex question of the suffering body.

Part I discusses the different forms and traditions of how suffering was staged, how that staging anticipated certain affects of the onlooker, but it also reflects on how the stage enabled audiences to get acquainted with distant suffering. It focuses on pain as ephemeral affect and what it means to be compassionately affected, particularly when hurt bodies enter contexts of performance. Part II deals with the question of how the availability (both physically and conceptually) of a beholder affects the pain of a victim. It not only discusses who watches, but also how the watching happens, and how it energises the sense of victimhood and the bonds between an onlooker and the object of pity, empathy, or exhilaration. Examining conventional images and poetic language that are deployed in order to reproduce the sensation of pain, it underlines the complicated ethos of victimhood. Part III discusses the institutional interpretative framing of violence and hurt bodies. The focus is on how the public spaces in which acts of violence were performed or represented (the theatre, the street, the stock exchange) determined the processes of staging and performing pain, but also of watching pain. With its focus on the institutions that governed these spaces and organised the staging of pain, this part of the book will elucidate on the intertwinement between the performance of pain, discussed in Part I, and the pain of the beholder, discussed in Part II. There is a strong focus in this last section on the element of punishment and how hurt bodies had to exemplify the political and moral power of the discussed institutions through their hurtful effect on the onlooker. Contrary to modern intuitions about public punishment, the final part shows how the spectacular form might have offered the possibility of shifting audience perspectives on ‘disserved’ affliction – perspectives barred from modern forms that altogether shun the visible.

The Hurt(ful) Body seeks to bring into mutual dialogue several existing strands of the study of pain and embodied violence. It recurs to the study of text and metaphor in order to establish the perception of hurting bodies in the work of early modern authors in diverse fields. It embarks on the urban spaces reserved for the presentation of victims before audiences, covering gallows and performances, and imaginative representations of the patient and the punished in a constant to-and-fro. The book deals with the mediated, dynamic relationship between image and beholder, highlighting paintings, prints and written drama, its aim being to uncover conventions of representation and viewer-response that govern phenomena as diverse as torturous colonial encounters, stock-exchange excess and a revived aesthetics of the ‘terrible’.

There is a growing body of work on the representation of violence and our book enthusiastically embraces this rapidly expanding field of study, but among those contributions available to an English readership, the interest in the violent or pain-inflicting event resides often in how such an event furnishes the pretext for a literary or painterly act of representation. The aim in this growing scholarship seems to be to expand our knowledge of how some author, engraver or painter went about doing a certain work of description, and how the violent nature of his or her subject might have impinged on this enterprise. But while authors in recent years have tended to bring fictional accounts and textual representations to the fore, these tend to lead to a history written in binary terms – a history that concerns itself with what is perceived to be a portrait of violence that has documentary reliability or, when subject-matter and genre considerations come to the fore, to owe to the ingrained topicality of represented violence. Although these questions remain relevant for examining what survives, for instance, of politicised accounts of violence in 1790s France,⁶ the chapters assembled in this book signal the need to transcend a binary that opposes history to representation in any simple terms. This is not to say the terms are not valid – the danger is that they imply a false dissection of the object we wish to examine: the violent body.

0.2 Pieter Bruegel the elder, Massacre of the Innocents, 1565

0.3 Lucas van Valckenborch (attributed), The Massacre of the Innocents, 1586

Real or mediated spectacles of pain?

Giving precedence to the opaque, authorial concerns in representing may entail, for instance, using X-ray and infrared photography of Pieter Bruegel's Massacre of the Innocents at Hampton Court (Figure 0.2) to gain a better understanding of a painter coming to grips with the mixed sense of censure and attraction emerging from what he manifestly hesitated to show us: the corpses of the murdered infants and the act of killing itself. In his discussion of the Bruegel painting and the telling restraints in representing the slaughter, Nigel Spivey has pointed to the measure in which the artist plays with this topical theme of Herod's killings, well-established in painters’ repertoires and thereby easily categorised as ‘conventional’, by choosing a contemporary setting in a northern, snow-covered landscape. Imitating one of Bruegel's versions of the massacre, in 1586 Lucas van Valckenborch painted a similar composition, which more clearly enlisted the Massacre to perform a documentary service (Figure 0.3). Herod's troops are made to look even more contemporary, as Valckenborch outfitted them as Spanish halberdiers, thereby allowing the mercenaries of the Duke of Alba, the Spanish deputy who ravaged Protestant towns, to ‘perform’ the biblical tale for the viewer. Adopting Bruegel's taste for the immediately recognisable, Valckenborch turned his own adaptation of the Massacre, to quote Spivey, into a veritable ‘bulletin of late sixteenth-century news’.⁷ Yet one should not overlook the fact that any political allusion made here remains encrypted in the form of allegory. Valckenborch is recording conflicts of his times without sacrificing the conventions of painting. This means that the beholder of the scene still needed, somehow, to connect the two levels. Through his painting, the biblical massacre becomes fused with a contemporary audience's more fraught, or anguished, relationship to contemporary violent spurts.

Many of the staged, written, painted and engraved images presented in this book consist of such layered representations. If they show us misery, punishment or torture, they also need to be treated as an artefact or text carrying a fictional subject matter. Within such conventions, nevertheless, they hold the residue of actual, possibly observed or witnessed motifs. In this, the paradigm is set by visual images of hell, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were speckled with real forms of gallows equipment and told of real spectacles of criminal punishment. In Chapter 1, Christian Biet indeed proposes that the new, more enclosed spaces of theatrical representation emerging in the second half of the sixteenth century made this possibility of referencing modern violence within religious representation particularly compelling. Transcending the binary constitution of an object of representation as existing only on this side of a divide from the ‘raw’ historical event, it has not been our intention to give ontological priority to either the real or the mediated, and wherever possible to continue to address both intermittently. The chapters work together to produce an account of what historical conditions for the visual, what type of beholding consciousness, was constituted by an ability to countenance both the imminent scene of raw pain and the conventionalised imagery or topical pretext that circulated in texts, performances and material images. In order to achieve this reconstitution of a historical beholder, and before arriving at a general characterisation of this beholder as compassionate or cruel, a reconstruction and basic analysis of the space for performing and viewing pain has been necessary. This simple schema, however, sets aside the separation of the strictly historical and the strictly performed, and seeks to return the reader to the point where history and performance met: the image. Whatever anguish audiences might have felt about the plague sufferer, or whatever excitement they might have sought in the gallows, some of these same beholders had access to ‘safer’ places as well, as an increasingly distanced set of opportunities to see violence, those of representations, began to address violence in the manner of Valckenborch and Verstegan.

These audiences – if any such monolithic entity can be said to have existed outside public spaces of culture – were at times to assume postures towards real victims in the gallows, but they also enjoyed the distractions of theatre, of the print and of literature. Habitually, they confronted modernising conditions of being present, of becoming subject to straining viewing circumstances that had an impact on how the cultural encounter with performance and imaging took shape. Whether in the theatre or when faced with religious violence, the witness becomes a fraught participant inside violent goings-on, or faces submission and humiliation inside such an event. Hence, this book perhaps restores a particular identity to early modern audiences, which emerge as men and women biographically positioned to inhabit spaces of punishment and of cultural relief, given to experiencing the two as contiguous in ways that are difficult to imagine in a modern, Western public sphere, so effectively cleansed of direct cruelty, yet teeming with omni-present media representations of violence. Disengaged from binary terms of convention and truth, this historical beholder may be thought of as existing within a web of relations. These relations are laid out through three rubrics, as we have explained: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. The Hurt(ful) Body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts.

The account that has resulted from the outlined desiderata will lead the reader through the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions, and as a result it does not represent a neat historical arc. However, all contributions are united by their concentration on two bodies: that of the beholder and that of the victim/performer. To unite these two, the chapters engage the spaces, ritual framings, and mediating agents that prepared, maintained, and were affected by the establishment of relations of performing the victim and viewing the affliction, and generally of responding to violence. The contributions revolve around the histories of the early modern stage and the visual arts, but literary representation, martial discipline, institutions of justice, episodes of financial stress and race-specific colonial discourses are called in to strengthen this account. Chronologically, the book spans the long period of secularisation and gradual advent of laws banning spectacular violence from the urban fabric: roughly speaking, it covers the time that elapses between the cited passage from Verstegan or Bruegel's and Valckenborch's Massacres and Edmund Burke's famous construction of modern viewing in his theory of the sublime.

Visual conditions of witnessing pain

In early modern conceptions of the corporeal condition of pain, the growing role of medical thinking wrought important changes to the relationship between the hurt body and its observer. Medicine increasingly tended to obfuscate the visual condition of hurt as an object of experience, an object of knowledge and power, established by and for a watching Other, rather than simply by the sufferer (and his clinician) for himself or herself. Understanding this visual conundrum of being seen to suffer, or being seen to behold the victim, places us squarely in the notion of the gaze. Images of pain emerge in what Foucault described as the nexus of vision and power in the act of surveillance – the beholder's authorising of who looks, whom is looked at, and to what effect – but gaze can also be taken in its Lacanian dimension.⁸

The important contribution of theories of the gaze are, however, not the only tools that prove their worth in accepting that pain and suffering demand a historical enquiry that takes into account the visual.⁹ Many books have taken as their theme the social forms and local histories of audiences engaging with live suffering men and women in hospitals,¹⁰ in ritual punishment or in religious life.¹¹ Thus we know a lot about material and ephemeral images made and seen by audiences that