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Abstract
In their various forms, pain and suffering—at both the individual and community level—fascinate writers and artists. The medieval and early modern periods hold a reputation for literature and art that graphically depicts pain and suffering, but academic studies have focused largely on the religious aspects of this topic, especially in the devotional literature of the mystics. This dissertation explores how pain was understood in the late medieval and early modern periods with a focus on how pain was written about in non-devotional literature. Each chapter analyzes writing that focuses on literary representations of different experiences of pain within the cultural and intellectual context of the period, considering how this can inform our readings of the texts as a whole, and pain in particular. Chapter One establishes an understanding of pain in the medieval and early modern period, building on the intellectual models of Augustine, Galen, and Aristotle. Chapter Two examines how the pain of childbirth was understood, discussed, and looks specifically at The York Play, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex in relationship to medical texts such at The Trotula. Chapter Three examines the relationship between pain and love in late medieval and early modern English literature through Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid. The final chapter explores pain in war, specifically in the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. These adventures depict lengthy scenes of violent battle, but the individual character’s pain is occluded, creating an eerie silence in an otherwise noisy poem. Through a broad range of texts, this dissertation examines how literature in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth century dealt with three particular experiences of pain: pain in childbirth, pain in love and grief, and pain in war.
