How often does a scholarly work induce in its reader the desire to have attended the conference that begot it? The Sense of Suffering, a polished assemblage of essays delivered at the University of Leiden during its 2007 conference on the representation of pain in early modern culture, did just that: this superb collection is well researched, elegantly edited, and richly illustrated. In their introduction, the editors Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel remind us that pain is a “deeply cultural phenomenon” as they forge ahead with a capacious book that covers a broad geographical and temporal scope and conjures up eloquence from interdisciplinarity.

We read here that from one culture to another individuals do not react identically to the same wound or affliction; that the experience of pain is rarely fixed, often personalized, and almost always mitigated by the social, cultural, and religious contexts in which it unfolds. The early moderns did not (and of course could not) share our postmodern palliative paradigm, one that avoids pain at all costs through sophisticated medications, medical interventions, and anesthetization. In that period in fact, even surgery provided the infliction of a pain to alleviate another, a case of fighting fire with fire. For the early moderns then, physical and mental pain — and a great deal is made of this dualism in the collection — often sent a cryptic message either interpreted as divine retribution, a challenge toward its sublimation, a template for the construction of gender, or a didactic tool to apprehend the will of God and the meaning of existence. Pain was, in other words, life's unrelenting presence begging for narratives; the early moderns' willingness to “make sense of their pain” created some of the literary and iconographic “constructions” that are prodded here with great insight in eighteen accomplished essays.

The religious upheavals of the period loom large on this collective study; both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, we read repeatedly, brought with their respective doctrinal repudiations and innovations countless permutations to the perceptions of human suffering. Christian factionalism, united nonetheless by a foundational symbol of torture, made pain an ideological battlefield, and the present essays discuss their intestine warring at length. That the history of pain in the early modern period would invite rich epistemological inquiries will not surprise: the body has, after all, become in recent scholarship the richest of texts, and in the selected bibliographies that accompany each contribution of The Sense of Suffering one will recognize many old friends being put to sound use.

Yet, if the contributors dwell on a broad interpretative canon (didactic manuals, medical treaties, legal documents, philosophical and devotional writings, woodcuts, religious biographies, art history, and even works of literary criticism), I was puzzled by the minor place made at the table for early modern drama, this obvious repository of representations of pain in the period. Only one essay, a penetrating essay by Franz Willem Korsten, addresses stage literature directly. Kristine Steenbergh uses the tragedies of Seneca for her insightful essay on pain, anger, and revenge. Richard III appears briefly in Mary Ann Lund's excellent analysis of Donne's imagery of pain in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Michael Schoenfelt, in an inspired meditation on “aesthetics as anesthetics,” uses Hamlet and Samson Agonistes only sparingly. This lack of engagement with stage literature is, however, a small grievance.

The polyphonic nature of any such interdisciplinary collection cannot but invite comparison, and some of the contributions assembled here will speak louder than others. In one of my favorite entries, Anita Transiger examines didactic manuals condoning daily beatings for young students of Latin; the beatings, a hazing of sort, were understood as an efficient praxis for the fabrication of male identity. Both editors contribute an essay and these are absorbing moments of this lengthy book. This volume, a welcome addition to the discussion of pain and its representation, deserves our close attention.