ABSTRACT
Historians of pain in early modern Europe are confronted with the critical question of how to classify it as an experience: Do we place it, as has generally been done, into histories of the emotions, drawing on the lineage of the passions? Or, taking inspiration both from modern medical understandings of the senses and from seventeenth-century descriptions of the experience of pain, do we incorporate it rather into a history of the early modern sensorium? This chapter argues that any meaningful cultural history of pain must take them equally into account: early moderns understood pain as an intensely sensory experience that at the same time had a strongly affective, interpersonal dimension. It was because of its combined sensory and affective qualities, moreover, that physical pain formed a crucial ingredient of early modern understandings of selfhood and community: both were forged in the experience of pain.
