ABSTRACT
Pain is not only a feeling, but an emotion, a complex experience whose historical appraisal involves the study of it as a form of theatre. Far from lacking a voice, or posing a challenge to language, pain may be studied through the analysis of the rhetorical and persuasive means historically employed to generate conviction, to persuade others about the reality of our feelings, sensations or emotions. The history of pain aims to unravel the persuasive procedures that have historically been used to make sense of the experience of harm. 1 From the point of view of its theatrical form, pain is a drama: it displays a dynamic structure that includes a moment of rupture that demands reparation. Those in pain live in a liminal space, in an indeterminate region where they wander between separation and reconciliation. It was the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey who first sought ways of applying social research to what he called the sphere of pre-predicative experience: that is, experience prior to all expression and sensation. 2 Unlike Kant, who considered that objects had to be felt through sensitivity prior to being thought of through understanding, Dilthey argued that all experience included a moment of reflexivity: a demand for meaning preceded by a temporal delimiting of the flow of life. To affirm that pain exists under the form of a social drama means that its historical variations manifest elements in common; it implies recognizing that, independently of its cultural expressions, there is a constant form of travelling down the path of suffering. 3 Since the mere presence of nociceptive (or harmful) stimuli does not necessarily imply the appraisal of a painful experience, and, on the contrary, since there are also pain experiences without visible or invisible lesions, the history of pain will have to take into consideration that pain is not a given. In the case of medieval and early modern Europe, there are, at least, two elements that should be taken into consideration. First, we will have to explore, and eventually explain, some of the most apparent contradictions regarding the representations and enactments of pain, either in the context of the visual arts or in penance and ascetic practices. Second, we will have to explore the way in which pain was linked to penance and retribution. Unlike contemporary conditions, where only the least possible amount of pain is accepted, and where the emphasis is usually placed on the distinction between necessary and unnecessary pain, the medieval attitude to physical suffering often regarded it under the form of the worst possible experience. This does not mean that learned medicine and healing practices did not attempt to provide remedies and treatments to ease sufferings of different kinds. Quite the opposite was true. 4 But it suggests that the way in which pain was understood, represented, felt, expressed or repressed also depended on a 170strong connection with the logic of salvation, on the one hand, and damnation, on the other. Finally, as in the more general field of the history of the emotions, we will have to examine the historical continuity or discontinuity of pain and suffering.
