Painful pleasures

Christopher Vaccaro is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Vermont

'The nuanced strengths of each chapter are often in longer, detailed argument, frequently grounded in the close reading of specific texts. Overall, this is a worthwhile and stimulating collection that many readers will find deeply thought-provoking.'Elizabeth Eva Leech, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

• Introduction: the jouissance of medieval kink - Christopher VaccaroPart I: Spiritual and penitential (con)texts1 Humiliation as penance in some early penitentials - Erin Abraham2 Land of saints and sadists: the S&M scene(s) in medieval Ireland - Phillip A. Bernhardt-House3 Failed sadism and masochistic martyrdom in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames - Tina-Marie Ranalli4 The monastic pleasures of frustrated knowledge - Karmen MacKendrick5 The pains of being pure at heart: sadomasochism in Richard of St. Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love - Christopher Michael Roman6 Negotiating power and pleasure in the Book of Margery Kempe - Nicole SlippPart II: Courtly and secular (con)texts7 I am not having what she’s having: female sexual (un)pleasure medieval and modern - Juliana Dresvina8 Queer consolation: BDSM in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale, sadistic epistemology and the ends of suffering - Masha Raskolnikov9 Ideological sadism or cultural enhancement: thirteenth-century Mongols in Kievan Rus and Baghdad - Vicky Panossian10 Fetishizing the past: Troilus and Criseyde, sadomasochism, and the historophilia of modern BDSM - Kersti Francis11 ‘My warlike grip broke his beating heart’: masochism and the deadly embrace in Beowulf ll. 2501-2508a - Christopher Vaccaro12 Death drive and the maiden: the queerness of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim - Philip Liston-KraftIndex