This chapter investigates the nature of sexual sins within the lay and clerical communities and details how social and physical pain of offenders, through fasting, exile, and service, healed the community and repaired the soul. It provides critical evidence of a penitential creed: ‘contraries are cured by contraries’. Humiliation plays important and sometimes implicitly defined roles in the early penitentials. As the fundamental basis of contrition, shame occupies an important place in repentance. As such, displays of humiliation and debasement manifest contrition and are integral to the penitential discipline that early penitentials sought to facilitate. Humiliation also had specific social functions geared towards the restoration of honour damaged by that behaviour. Whether through visible abstinence, personal abasement, or exile, it both publicly lowered the status of the sinner while elevating that of their victims. In this way, humiliation as penance provided an outlet for those damaged by another’s sin, an indirect form of vengeance that would ideally satisfy the injured party in part by providing a social form of sadistic pleasure at the offender’s social and, at times, physical pain.

This chapter examines the revivification of the figure of Julius Caesar in three early modern responses to Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, avoiding an overtly political reading of Lucan to trace instead an intimate conversation between classical poet, early modern translators and imitators. Starting with Lucans First Booke – a translation that presents as blood-transfusion – I show how Marlowe’s reanimation of Caesar as a Roman Tamburlaine enables the anti-hero to escape the bounds of Lucan’s censoriously moralising and fractured poem. Turning next to the anonymously authored academic drama The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar’s Revenge, we find the full articulation of a Caesar who fulfils and exceeds this Marlovian potential, and an author who runs the attractions to negative repetition in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile to their natural endpoint: dissolution of the cosmos and the complete confusion of its moral eschatology. The chapter concludes by analysing the destabilising effects of such a revivification of Caesar for both poem and author, via close reading of Thomas May’s 1627 Pharsalia; and in the same author’s attempts both to kill Caesar and ‘end’ Lucan in his 1630 Continuation. The multiple iterations of May’s translation and supplement enact the struggle to resist the super-charged early modern Caesar and Lucan’s unresolved, repetitive poetics alike: and May can accomplish his task in the end only by succumbing to Lucan’s regressive poetics of repetition, adopting early modern tragedy's politics of personal vengeance, and appropriating for his own authorial self the blood-transfusion metaphor of Lucans First Booke.

This chapter recognises a desire for failure and the power surrounding Truth within the cultural imaginary, while exploring the sadomasochistic epistemologies of confession. Christian asceticism appears to be a denial of pleasure, based in contempt for worldly life. Christian monasticism, with its ascetic emphasis on self-renunciation, seems at most to permit abstract and obscure intellectual pleasures. But these are destined to fail: they aim at a God beyond knowing, as beyond knowing, and require an insistence on the knower’s inferiority and limitation at the same time that the desire to know must go beyond those limitations – such that it becomes unclear whose desire it is. The self who knows must be known completely to be made as pure as possible, but inner divisions create an elusive remainder outside knowing. Fortunately, there is also a perverse pleasure in the humiliations of failure and frustration built into the monastic emphasis on love and desire even as they entangle with learning and knowledge.

Poets take flight for an immortality of fame in the heavens, whether experienced in fancy by their own living selves, posthumously in the praises of other writers, or by proxy in the fictional flights of characters in their works. Ovid’s flight of fame in the epilogue to the Metamorphoses is a summation of previous poetic tradition, including Horace’s aspirations to undying fame, imagined in Odes 2.20 as flight in the form of a swan, and Ennius’ posthumous flight on the lips of men. Aspirations to flight are experienced as risky. In Odes 4.2 Horace warns against attempting Pindaric flights. Mythological high-fliers who come crashing down, Daedalus and Phaethon, are figures for poets’ anxieties about the chances of immortalizing themselves in flights of sublimity. The classical sources inform Spenser’s celebration of the deceased Sir Philip Sidney in ‘The Ruines of Time’, combining classical and Christian themes of ascent. The chapter closes with readings of Astolfo’s journey to the moon in cantos 34 and 35 of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Milton’s reworking of Ariosto’s Valley of Lost Things on the moon in the Paradise of Fools in Paradise Lost 3, a place of failed Satanic ascents in counterpoint with the poet Milton’s own aspirations to poetic and spiritual flight. Comparative attention is also given to a visual depiction of the apotheosis of poetry, Ingres’ ‘Apotheosis of Homer’.

This chapter considers how consensual masochism and performative piety enable Margery Kempe to reclaim her body and evade traditional fifteenth-century power dynamics. Margery navigates away from the non-consensual pain of earthly relationships towards a consensual and empowering devotional masochism with Christ, who serves as her loving Master. Modern Dom/sub dynamics serve as a lens through which the chapter examines Margery’s relationship to God’s power. The chapter details the considerable evidence that Margery links erotics and suffering in her text in ways that resonate with modern BDSM. Her painful penitence and violent fantasies bring her pleasure and fulfilment. Ultimately, Margery’s relationship with God involves an empowering masochism.

The dramatic works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960) address an array of transgressive sexualities from scopophilia to sodomy that threaten her virgin protagonists, who struggle to liberate themselves from the fetters of eros by seeking refuge in chastity and death. In her plays Dulcitius, Pafnutius, and Abraham, and the legend of Pelagius, Hrotsvit creates queer spaces, as conceptualised by Teresa de Lauretis, in which she interrogates the ever-raging battle between the sexual and death instincts for dominance over human existence. Nowhere, perhaps, is that conflict more evident than in the masochism that characterises Hrotsvit’s martyrs. Hrotsvit’s interest, however, is not in non-normative sexuality per se, but rather in the energy inherent in the sexual drive that can and must be captured and redirected into the realisation of a heterotopic vision – a quasi-utopia in which chastity is nonetheless generative and life continues beyond death. The community of religious women at Gandersheim, with its doors open to pilgrims and patrons, offered fertile ground for the theatrical imagination of the canoness Hrotsvit, if not an actual stage for the performance of her works. This chapter points to an excessive sexuality that appears as a martyr’s masochism and Hrotsvit’s restructuring of the masochism of the death drive to establish a quasi-utopian homosocial community.

The first section of the Introduction provides the backdrop needed for readers to understand the nature of sadomasochistic desires as they were interpreted by psychologists and sexologists from Richard von Kraftt-Ebing to Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman. The next section closely examines the important aspects of contemporary BDSM in Western culture. It looks at role-play and role reversals, the pleasures of domination, submission, pain and impact play, and the dissolution of the self. The chapter moves on to focus on the identifiable correspondences between medieval expressions of sadomasochistic desire and what is practised today. It explores first religious and then courtly contexts. The last section explains the volume’s connections to pleasure, bodies, and pain, and outlines its structure and chapter descriptions.

Several scenes in medieval Irish narrative texts involving the whipping of one character by another with an echflesc (horsewhip/riding crop) are known; and while two of these (in Fingal Rónáin and Serglige Con Culainn) are due to sexual matters, a third (which seems more comparable to that in Serglige Con Culainn) occurs in the Latin vita of St Colum Cille (aka Columba) is not apparently sexual. The latter two also share in common their visionary or mantic/prophetic results, and are done by supernatural figures in what appears to be a punitive manner. The question of how to interpret these incidents is a thorny matter, and one in which modern ideas about sadomasochistic activities may or may not be relevant. What is at stake may in fact be the manner via which a reader decides to examine these texts, and whether in adopting the hermeneutical framework of the ‘switch’, then one decides to ‘bottom’ to the cultural contexts of the narratives or ‘top’ with their potentially eroticised interpretive strategies and modern critical theories.

In expressions of sadomasochistic desire from the Middle Ages to modernity, cultural conceptions of the past directly shape the erotics of their present. By examining Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde alongside a previously unknown archive of mid-twentieth-century American BDSM erotica, this chapter argues that the erotics of sadomasochism depend upon the pleasurable tension that exists between past and present. This tension, termed here ‘historophilia’, underpins Troilus and Criseyde’s setting against the backdrop of the Trojan War as well as more recent appeals to the medieval past as the origin of BDSM culture. Each of the texts under consideration employ historical fantasies to justify the pleasures of their erotic violence, indicating that the fetishisation of pain can be read as a fetishisation of the past. Just as Criseyde reads the Thebaid to reckon with her war-shaped relationship with Troilus, so too does the medievalism displayed in mid-twentieth-century sadomasochistic erotica expose a desire to participate in a sexual legacy that can be traced back through the centuries. Reading Chaucer’s romantic ‘tragedie’ against the roots of modern BDSM demonstrates that the subtextual tension between past and present generates as much titillation as the conflict between pleasure and pain.

This chapter analyses Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ as a conversation with Shakespeare’s Roman plays, tracing a pattern of allusion to the Shakespearean suicides Antony, Cleopatra and Brutus to deepen our understanding of Samson’s final act. This writerly conversation is a political one: the chapter builds on the argument of Milton and the Politics of Public Speech, comprehending the seventeenth-century public sphere in Arendtian terms, as a revival of the Greek polis or Roman republic, centred on public speech as political action. For Milton, poetry is a form of oratory, and drama, the art-form of democratic Athens, both represents and embodies public speech. Pointing out that groups disenfranchised in the classical state became metaphors for political disempowerment in early modern polemic (whether terms of abuse to delegitimise opponents or protesting political oppression), the chapter uncovers a strong republican undertow in ideas of effeminacy in Shakespeare and Milton, and brings a newly political perspective to their treatments of gender and sexuality. Yet Samson’s defining act, while fulfilling the republican ideal of selfless public service, and recalling the Senecan view of suicide as the ultimate assertion of individual liberty, goes beyond the masculinist terms of classical republicanism. For Milton draws on Shakespeare’s figuration of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s joint suicide as a ‘transcendent marriage’ to depict the regenerate Samson as androgyne in his union with God. The chapter at once reveals the availability to early modern readers of distinctively republican subcurrents in Shakespeare and illuminates the ways Milton justifies Samson’s suicide in a Christian framework.