This book is an updated Hebrew
translation of The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. The subject of this book is human
pain in the later middle ages (13th-15th
centuries) in Western Europe. The author surveys and analyzes the ways
people wrote about pain in different situations (like the difference between
childbirth and toothache), and the ways people described their own pains. In a
world with very few pain-killers and nothing at all to make surgery bearable,
people suffered much more pain than we do today. Consequently, since they could
not banish pain, they sought meanings for it. Physicians claimed that one
should not try to soothe pain, since pain was an indicator of disease and as
such, it was useful. Lawyers and judges claimed that the infliction of pain by
torture was a tried-and-true method for eliciting true confessions from
criminal suspects. Experts in Christian theology debated the nature of Christ’s
pain during his Crucifixion, and mystics tried to identify with it, even to
feel it. The common people were exhorted by preachers to bear their illnesses
with patience, since pain on earth saved them future sufferings in the
afterworld.
In conclusion, medieval attitudes
towards pain were radically different from modern ones: while we try and
conquer pain, seeing it as a challenge, people in the past, who were often in
constant pain, gave reasons for suffering and adopted pain as part of their
lives.