Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England

by John R. Yamamoto-Wilson

Luther's 95 Theses begin and end with the concept of suffering, and the question of why a benevolent God allows his creations to suffer remains one of the central issues of religious thought. In order to chart the processes by which religious discourse relating to pain and suffering became marginalized during the period from the Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century, this book examines a number of works on the subject translated into English from (mainly) Spanish and Italian. Through such an investigation, it is possible to see how the translators and editors of such works demonstrate, in their prefaces and comments as well as in their fidelity or otherwise to the original text, an awareness that attitudes in England are different from those in Catholic countries. Furthermore, by comparing these translations with the discourse of native English writers of the period, a number of conclusions can be drawn regarding the ways in which Protestant England moved away from pre-Reformation attitudes of suffering and evolved separately from the Catholic culture which continued to hold sway in the south of Europe. The central conclusion is that once the theological justifications for undergoing, inflicting, or witnessing pain and suffering have been removed, discourses of pain largely cease to have a legitimate context and any kind of fascination with pain comes to seem perverse, if not perverted. The author observes an increasing sense of discomfort throughout the seventeenth century with texts which betray such fascination. Combining elements of theology, literature and history, this book provides a fascinating perspective on one of the key conundrums of early modern religious history.

Genres: History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

It's been an eventful life! I suppose the central, pivotal event in it was failing my PhD at Cambridge, not once, but twice. Read up on Colin McCabe and the Faculty of English at Cambridge if you're interested in the background to that. From my point of view, I can just sum it up by saying if you're not on either side in a civil war you can expect to get shot down by both sides!

But, as the Dalai Lama says, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. I put academia in the bottom drawer and spent the next few years leading a bohemian kind of life, mostly in the south of Spain. I think I learned more from that than I had from my years as a university student.

Gradually, though, I drifted into teaching, and hence back into academia. When, at the age of 40, I got a job at a Japanese university - and married a Japanese woman for good measure - I started to dig out that stuff from the bottom drawer and rework it into papers for publication.

Bit by bit, I started to become something of an expert in the field, and when I got a sabbatical year I dedicated it to writing a monograph. When it came out I packed it, and all my other peer-reviewed work, into a cardboard box, in triplicate, and sent it off to Cambridge for consideration for a PhD.

In 2013, 40 years after first registering as a PhD student, I finally got that PhD from Cambridge! The monograph (the book on early modern attitudes towards suffering listed in my profile) played a major part in that.

In April 2018 I retired, and now spend my time doing pretty much exactly what I want. I walk the dog, take trips to interesting places, go to the hot spring - and, above all, create videos for my new online educational channel, "Ano sensei! Educational videos", on YouTube (which you really should subscribe to, 'cos it's a gas!).

Reviews

[Eamonn Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pain, Pleasure and Perversity (Ashgate 2013) by John Yamamoto-Wilson is a fine book. It is a work of considerable learning and is equipped with a meticulous bibliographical apparatus as befits a contribution to scholarly discourse. It is clear that Yamamoto-Wilson's arguments are based on extensive reading in primary and secondary sources and his conclusions are finely nuanced. I do, however, think that this is a book not without appeal to the general reader with an interest in the history of ideas and religion, which is the context in which I offer these thoughts.

Yamamoto-Wilson subjects early modern translations of several key texts to close intertextual scrutiny. He notes the contrast between Protestant/Northern and Catholic/Southern attitudes to pain and pleasure. The discussions of contemporary and near-contemporary translations of stoic and epicurean texts, hagiographies including St Jerome's Life of Saint Paul the Hermit and martyrologies are particularly fascinating. He also analyses texts as diverse as Samuel Butler's Hudibras, John Bunyan's works, Cervantes's Don Quixote and Mary Wroth's Urania. He then goes on to show that normative readings from the earlier part of the century are gradually extended to include sexualised dimensions by the end of the century. In particular he points out that whilst references to almost the entire range of human sexual practice can be identified in texts from the written record back to antiquity, references to masochism are not seen until the 18th century.

He notes "As the century progressed the focus of the debate. . .moved away from theological arguments about the nature and necessity of suffering and the relative merits of penance and repentance, towards discrediting the idea that lustful desires could be driven out by punishing the body." (p79) And a little later we read "Slowly and by degrees, the idea that self-chastisement does not work because of the way in which Catholics perform it started to give way to the idea that it cannot work because of its very nature." (p94)

But he is careful not to read back into the 17th century an over-determined psychoanalytical perspective, whilst providing the reader with an appropriate context for the understanding of the development of ideas about sado-masochism. In particular Yamamoto-Wilson makes use of an approach to sado-masochism as formulated in the work of Katherine Fowkes. ("…although it is critical that the masochist's suffering appears to stem from another, the pain is actually self-inflicted.") Despite the fact that these comments of Fowkes set in a Lacaninan framework are made in relation to the role of supernatural agency in mainstream comedic film, the general point is well made. If that other is God, then God is only the cause of the suffering insofar as He "engages with the repentant sinner in a covenantal agreement, the terms of which are defined by the sinners's own sense of what constitutes fair payment in restitution of the sins he or she has committed." (Yamamoto-Wilson p43)

Yamamoto-Wilson is a considerable linguist and the section discussing the intertextuality of Cervantes's Don Quixote and Ribadeneira's Life of Ignatius Loyola is full of interest. Referring to the works of the protestant writer, Edward Stillingfleet, Yamamoto-Wilson points out that "by linking Ignatius with the fictional Quixote, [Stillingfleet] deconstructs him as an embodiment of an ancient tradition and recasts him as a fool trying to turn the mythic past into a magical present, in which delusion, not grace, transforms sufferings and humiliations into glory and splendour." (p111)

Yamamoto-Wilson also examines the linkage particularly in Catholic discourse between self-mortification and cruelty to others, "if true kindness to one's own soul is best expressed by severity and harshness, then true kindness to others must take the same form." (p132) From a modern perspective this certainly looks like a perverse interpretation of the compassion we are enjoined to extend to others by the New Testament. Yamamoto-Wilson explains this incongruity by "the Catholic tendency to stress compassion in terms of the forgiveness of God for his fallen creatures contrasts with the Protestant emphasis on the compassion of humans for each other…" (p141) But there seems to be a considerable gulf between belief and practice in each case.

If there is a criticism to be made of Yamamoto-Wilson's thesis, it is that those of us who have been brought up in the Western tradition are already inscribed to some extent with the dichotomies he anatomises. So even at this remove an element of bias within the schematics he advances (penance/repentance, Catholic/Protestant, South/North) can creep into the analysis.

For example in a nice passage towards the end of the book he states "for Protestants, the question of whether one was indeed among the elect was a source of continual anxiety and soul-searching, Catholics simply had to keep the accounts straight in their reckoning with God and, if they fell a bit behind in this world, they could catch up in Purgatory in the next." (p160)

But for someone who was brought up as a Roman Catholic this seems to me to neglect the jeopardy posed by mortal sin as taught in the catechism. I'm not sure what constituted a mortal sin in the 17th century, but to a mid-20th century schoolboy the scope of mortal sin seemed alarmingly wide. And to die encumbered with a mortal sin meant eternal damnation. So there was still anxiety, even though that anxiety could be assuaged by means of confession, contrition and absolution. But perhaps I am just exemplifying here the old joke about the difference between the Protestant atheist and the Catholic atheist.

Finally the chapters on gender and sexual politics have much to recommend them. Yamamoto-Wilson discusses the position of women like Aphra Behn and Mary Wroth in the context of the possibilities available to woman (writers) for self-actualisation. In contrast he also discusses the ways in which the Protestant subject could be gendered as a female - particularly in the writings of the early Quakers who scandalously allowed women to speak at their meetings.