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Dear Francois, I have been working for several years on attitudes to physical pain in the later middle ages, and the bottom line is that in mystical and theological writings "dolor" hardly ever makes the distinction of physical and emotional pain. Thus, most paintings depict the seven sorrows of the Virgin as seven swords stuck in her breast. The theme of self-inflicted pain by late medieval mystics as a means of identifying with the suffering Christ (and Suso had his mother's example there) is, as you undoubtedly know, extremely common. The business of bypassing the words is another matter. If you notice, you were quoting the "Life of the Servant" - Suso's own autobiography. Had he really wanted to avoid the words, he could have avoided the description. But similar verbal descriptions turn up in biographies (vide Catherine of Siena, for example) and autobiographies. I don't mean to cast any doubt on the veracity of the self-inflicted pain practices; I do mean to suggest that publicizing them is part of what Kleinberg called the interaction of the living saint with his or her audience. (see, for example, the life of Christina Mirabilis by Thomas of Cantimpre'). Christina did it by bodily motion, others did it via verbal communication - otherwise we wouldn't know about it! The experience itself is totally intransmissible in verbal terms (a problem most anthropologists of pain have been dealing with in the last few years), but the attempt is invariably there. The word is not bypassed, it is an integral part of the attempt to transmit the experience of imitatio Christi. So the "sensible sympathy" had first to be experienced, and then told about... All the best, Esther Cohen %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%