Alanna Skuse, Hurt Feelings: Wounding Oneself in Early Modern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)246 pp. Open access eBook. ISBN: 978-3-032-04565-2. £44.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-032-04564-5
Hurt Feelings is an exploration of the range of functions to which self-wounding could be put in early modern literature. Alanna Skuse analyses five categories of function: persuasion (chapter 2), protest (chapter 3), healing (chapter 4), punishment (chapter 5), and defence (chapter 6). Each of these areas have methods of wounding which tend to be associated with them – Skuse’s analysis of self-wounding as punishment, for example, centres on self-gelding (castration). This structure points towards her central argument: that, unlike today, self-wounding was not primarily viewed as a medical problem but could rather be put to a range of uses (2). Exactly which use-case an act of self-wounding was likely to be viewed within by early modern readers and audiences was highly context-dependent, with each of Skuse’s categories having their own conventions (15). The introduction promises novel approaches to ‘early modern rhetoric and embodiment’ (2) and ‘the injured and pained body’ (6). The rest of the book meets these goals.
The opening chapter (after the introduction) analyses perhaps one of the most recognisable instances of early-modern self-wounding: Portia’s self-stabbing in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Examining its use as a tool for persuasion, Skuse locates self-wounding within the field of gesture but also argues that ‘self-wounding may also go beyond gesture’ in leaving visible and lasting marks on the body (22). Skuse here fulfils her introductory promise to offer a new approach to ‘early modern rhetoric and embodiment’ (2) by carefully delineating self-wounding’s relation to that category. In comparing Portia’s stab wound to Tamburlaine’s cut in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, Skuse highlights the complexity of self-wounding’s mechanics as a communicative tool. She argues that ‘Tamburlaine’s self-wounding fails to fully convince his audience’ because he does not entirely grasp these mechanics (46). Her focus on an example of self-wounding failing to work as a character intended thus goes a long way to demonstrate her argument for the importance of ‘cultural scripts’, ‘codification’, and context-dependency in the reception of such actions (30).
The subsequent chapter, ‘Protest: Autoglossotomy and Biopolitics in The Spanish Tragedy’, begins by clarifying the relationship between self-wounding and suicide in this period, arguing that they were ‘not causally’ but were ‘conceptually linked’ (54). Skuse then places Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy within a classically-derived ‘tradition of tongue-biting as protest’ (65), analysing the varying ways Hieronimo’s autoglossotomy functions within the play, both as ‘a heroic assertion of autonomy’ and as a demonstration of madness (77). As she points out in the chapter’s conclusion, these simultaneous interpretations of an act of self-wounding display its malleability for early modern authors (77-8). This analysis combines detailed historicization with close attention to the effects of textual variance between early editions of the play.
Chapter 4 explores the lament tradition, where self-wounding could work therapeutically, ‘enabling emotional and physical self-regulation’ (81). Skuse highlights the ‘balance’ (104) of ‘ritualistic’ convention and ‘spontaneous’ emotional expression in these forms of self-wounding (82). As with her analysis of Tamburlaine’s ineffective attempt at persuasive self-wounding, her discussion of the potentially inauthentic lamentation of Cressida in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (104) highlights the intricacies of these conventions.
Moving from the poetry and drama analysed in previous chapters to an impressively wide range of ballads, medical texts, and other non-fictional genres, chapter 5 (‘Punishment: Self-Gelding as Social Suicide’) argues for the centrality of ‘public shaming’ (132-3) in self-castration narratives.
Skuse’s final category of self-wounding is ‘defence’, the subject of chapter 6. Here, she analyses how Saint Ebba’s cutting off her own nose, which she characterises as ‘a gendered act of self-defence’, posed particular interpretive challenges for its early modern readers (142), using this as a starting point for a broader discussion of a ‘long-running uneasiness’ around religious mortification (148).
One of the book’s great strengths is its methodological clarity and self-awareness. Skuse uses the terms ‘self-wounding’ and ‘self-injury’ (rather than the more familiar ‘self-harm’ or ‘non-suicidal self-injury’) to set parameters on the study (focussing on ‘the visible wound itself’) and to point towards the differences between early modern self-wounding and ‘modern “self-harm”’ (4). She carefully balances her thorough historicism with an awareness of the subject’s presentist resonances. The book’s structure allows her to mitigate any potential dangers of the anachronistic category by exploring separate practices (autoglossotomy, self-gelding, and lamentation, for instance) and drawing connections between them without eliding their differences. The coda (‘Self-Injury, Anachronism, and Engagement’) explores these issues directly. Skuse’s project involved a co-creation project with people with lived experience of self-injury, resulting in a play which is included as an appendix and quoted in epigraphs throughout the book. She reflects on this process in the coda, and, although the co-creation project is not explicitly incorporated into the rest of the book’s analysis, it is certainly encouraging to see a recent increase in such methods in this field. In recent years, Laura Seymour has led a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project on reading Hamlet with people with lived experience of neurodivergence and suicidality, and Veronica Heney’s PhD thesis on self-harm in modern and contemporary literature centred co-design.[1] Skuse’s methodological arguments make her book valuable to researchers of self-injury (and related topics such as suicide, embodiment, pain, and madness) in other periods’ literature, and her reflections on co-creation offer thoughtful and timely insight into the ethics of research impact and the role of lived experience.
Chloe Wilcox, Oxford University
[1] See Bradley J. Irish, ‘Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature, n.p., and ‘BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Awards 2022’, The British Academy, n.d.<https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/schemes/ba-leverhulme-small-research-grants/past-awards/baleverhulme-small-research-grants-awards-2022/> [accessed 29 December 2025] for details on Laura Seymour’s project; and Veronica Heney, Our Stories, Our Selves: Fictional Representations of Self-Harm (doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2022).
