Against this broader project backdrop, I am currently concentrating on two issues in particular: gender and temporality. Studies of medieval pain in a religious context almost exclusively focus on cases of suffering in the lives of holy women. I hope to offer a welcome corrective to the holes in present criticism, by studying the phenomenon of chronic pain in biographies of medieval holy men. Do holy men suffer differently than holy women? Are men subject to different kinds of (mis)treatment because of their pain? To what extent does gender play a role in the medieval experience of pain, in a religious context? Or is gender secondary to religiosity - i.e. the accepted holiness of a sufferer - in terms of the experience of chronic pain?
Modern scholarship of chronic pain brings to the fore the temporal effects of the experience of disability and chronic pain, which often leads to sufferers feeling ‘out of step’ with ‘normal’ time (Godden 2011; Hellström 1998; Hellström and Carlsson 1997; Morris 2010; Toombs 1990). The temporal ambiguities provoked by chronic pain lend additional analytical productivity to a methodology based on combining modern and medieval materials. For example, do chronic pain sufferers exist – at least narratively – on a separate timeline than ‘normal’ individuals? In this, then, do medieval and modern chronic pain patients actually have a significant shared temporal/existential stance? Does my methodological approach, bringing modern theories in touch with medieval theories, mirror the inherent structure of chronic pain sufferers as community across time?
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