Brings into mutual dialogue several existing strands of the study of pain and embodied violence. The volume's two-fold approach, themed both on the hurt and hurt-inducing body, is unique. It encompasses both the victim's presence as an image or performed event of pain and the transmitted burden or 'pain' experienced by the watching audience.

Tomas Macsotay is Research Lecturer in Art History at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona
Cornelis van der Haven is Senior Lecturer in Dutch Literature at Ghent University
Karel Vanhaesebrouck is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

Introduction - Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Part I: Performing bodies
1 Spectacle and martyrdom: bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) - Christian Biet
2 The Massacre of the Innocents: infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries - Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt
3 To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body - Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Part II: Beholders
4 'I feel your pain': some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain - Jonathan Sawday
5 Masochism and the female gaze - John Yamamoto-Wilson
6 Epicurean tastes: towards a French eighteenth-century criticism of the image of pain - Tomas Macsotay
7 Wounding realities and 'painful excitements': real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke's sublime - Aris Sarafianos
8 Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641-53 - Nicolás Kwiatkowski
Part III: Institutions
9 Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis: Frans-Willem Korsten
10 Palermo's past public executions and their lingering memory - Maria Pia Di Bella
11 The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices 1600-1750 - Inger Leemans
Epilogue - Javier Moscoso
Index