Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture

The Royal Touch in Early Modern England

With The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin, Stephen Brogan offers a new understanding of the royal touch – the ability of kings and queens to miraculously heal their subjects of particular diseases in 16th and especially 17th-century England. ‘Greater numbers of people were touched for scrofula during the Restoration by both Charles II and James II, and with greate...

Pre-Modern and Early Modern Persian Literature: Written while Travelling?

In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

Pressing the Flesh: Sensing Multiple Touch and Finger Pressure on Arbitrary Surfaces

This paper identifies a new physical correlate of finger pressure that can be detected and measured visually in a wide variety of situations. When a human finger is pressed onto a hard object the flesh is compressed between two rigid surfaces: the surface of the target object and the fingernail. This forces blood out of the vessels in the fingertip, changing its colour slightly, but systematica...

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to afocus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, po...