This project investigates the complicated modes through which pre-modern cultures influence and manage the emotional, mental, and physical well-being of their peoples. Specifically, I investigate the different roles and paradigms of suffering in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, ultimately building what I term a “heuristic of affliction.” This heuristic will be developed out of case studies of early modern representations (literary, religious, and historical) and original archival research at the Bodleian library in London. The heuristic will serve as a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the resistant and “intermodal” structures of representation of suffering in early modern culture, and how they function as tools designed to affect and correct experience. The interdisciplinary nature of my research, which spans literary and cultural studies, history of medicine, and religious studies, helps expose the complicated, disparate ways cultures police bodily experience in the pre-modern period. This proposal supports the first phase of this project, which includes initial primary and secondary research, concretized through conference papers and a book proposal that includes two sample chapters for publisher review. One of these chapters will focus on religious conversation as the site of global discourse, highlighting the ways conflicting paradigms of suffering spanned political, religious, and economic trade networks across the Middle East/Levant in the period.