Cabinet of Curiosities PG Symposium: 'Pain in the Early Modern Period'

Although representations of pain permeate the media of today, pain as a historical subject can be difficult to decipher. It may be argued that we as a society have become desensitised to the pain of others due to video games, horror films and gruesome television shows. What, then, was it like for members of early modern society who performed, witnessed or wrote about the subject? And how can an interior feeling such as suffering be reproduced for a wider audience? The Cabinet of Curiosities will be hosting three postgraduate students from both Sheffield and York to discuss the issue of early modern pain in just some of its various forms: the dissection of animals; the staging of death scenes on the French stage; and the depiction of pain in midwife manuals.

Joshua Scarlett (University of York), Air of the Dog – Robert Hooke and the Dissection of Live Animals

Rebecca Herd (University of Sheffield), ‘No Pain, No Gain’: Staging Death in the Tragedies of Seventeenth-Century French Female Playwrights

Amy Creighton (University of York), ‘Labouring Womens Sorrowfull Sufferings’: The Gendering of Labour Pains in Midwife Manuals, 1672-1737