Wounding Oneself in Early Modern Literature

This open access book offers the first full study of the phenomenon of self-wounding as it is represented in early modern literature. It looks at depictions of self-injury in ballads, plays, medical texts and histories from the 1580s to the turn of the eighteenth century. In this period, it argues, self-injury was not necessarily viewed as indicative of psychological distress, as it is in modern discourses of ’self-harm’. Rather, self-wounding might work as a form of protest, a persuasive tactic, a means of self-regulation or an assertion of agency over one’s own body. This book blends traditional literary studies methodologies with insights from sociology, emotion studies, cognitive psychology and practice-led research to shed new light on early modern ideas about rhetoric, authenticity, emotion, and the relationship between body and identity. The book also confronts the difficulties of examining such ’topical’ phenomena. Can the anachronism of comparisons between modern and historical self-injury be made productive, rather than reductive? What does it mean to talk about ’self-injury’ in a period which did not have a distinct word for these practices? In so doing, it suggests new directions for literary-historical studies of the body and its practices, arguing that in such cases, we should seek not to familiarise the past but to defamiliarize the present.

Alanna Skuse is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of two monographs, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England (CUP, 2021), as well as articles on various aspects of early modern embodiment. She also leads public history projects and writes for the popular history press, including her debut trade book The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: How to stay alive in Renaissance England (OneWorld, 2025).