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2009 RSA conference--panels on melancholy
| Location: | California, United States |
| Call for Papers Date: | 2009-05-20 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2008-05-10 |
| Announcement ID: |
162344 |
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Care of the Body, Care of the Soul: Melancholy in a
National Context
Scholars have long recognized melancholy’s rise in
prevalence as a physical disease, a mental disposition,
and a potentially perilous spiritual condition in sixteenth-
century Europe. In the 1920s, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz
Saxl first turned to the study of melancholy in the course
of tracing the sources behind Albrecht Dürer’s iconic
engraving, Melancholia I—a study that would eventually
expand into the book Saturn and Melancholy: studies in
the history of natural philosophy, religion, and art
(1964), written with Raymond Klibansky. Their analysis
of Aristotle’s Problem XXX underlined the fact that this
was the first text that combined a medical explanation of
melancholy as a physical disease and a mental
explanation of melancholy, wherein a few elected
individuals who naturally possessed the right percentage
of melancholic humor in their overall temperament were
considered intellectually superior--perittoi.
These two interpretations of melancholy were
further developed during the Middle Ages and the early
modern period: while fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
neo-Galenic medicine attempted to cure melancholy
mostly by treating the body, neoplatonists saw the
natural prevalence of melancholic humor as providing
the physical conditions necessary for great intellectual
and artistic expression. Literary scholars have also
charted melancholy’s increasing appeal in the national
literatures of the Renaissance, for example, in the works
of Garzoni, Burton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Cervantes.
Historians of early modern Europe have also noted the
melancholy vogue that seemed to sweep Europe in the
sixteenth century. In his cultural history of madness in
sixteenth-century Germany Erik Midelfort, for example,
called the sixteenth century the “age of melancholy.” In
a 2006 article on melancholy in early modern Europe
Angus Gowland wrote that “for the historian the problem
of early modern melancholy cannot be why so many
suffered from the disease, but why so many were
preoccupied with its assumed frequency. Instead of
asking why people were afflicted with melancholy, we
must ask why people described themselves or others as
melancholic and consider what they meant by this.”
Despite the ubiquity of melancholy in sixteenth-
century Europe, studies have tended to reflect regional
bias. Scholars writing about the melancholy vogue in
early modern northern Europe, for example, have
attributed its rise in popularity to political and spiritual
anxiety attendant on the religious reformations of the
sixteenth century. This series of panels aims to
reconsider melancholy and mental illness in a broader
European and interdisciplinary context.
Aims for panels:
• Inter-regional
• Inter-disciplinary
1. Melancholy and Religion
This panel(s) examines the nature of religious
melancholy in all of its sundry forms and aims to explore
the changing nature of spiritual discourse in the early
modern period throughout Europe. This is an enormous
topic covering a range of questions:
• Melancholy and atheism
• Melancholy and sectarian conflict in the wake of the
religious reforms of the sixteenth century
• Melancholy and spiritual healing
• Melancholy, witchcraft and possession
2. Melancholy, Medicine, and the Law
Mental incapacity intersected with the law in so far as it
threatened the material interests of individual families
and jeopardized fragile stability of household and
community alike. Where Roman law offered a treasury
of concepts and terms to confront legal problems
attendant on mental incapacity, the learned tradition of
medicine also contributed a language of mental illness
from which laypeople could draw in the course of
arguing their cases in the courts. This panel explores
how medical language and the disease melancholy in
particular came increasingly to be drawn into juridical
language as well as into the courts in sixteenth-century
Europe. It seeks to address not only how judges and
magistrates adjudicated cases involving mental illness,
but also seeks to identify the types of custodial
institutions or institutional arrangements made for the
purpose of caring for the mentally incapacitated.
3. Melancholy and Love
The interest in love melancholy in the early modern
period generated a great amount of medical,
philosophical, and literary texts on the subject. In them
the physical dimension of the illness coalesced with its
moral and psychological aspects. Furthermore, love
sickness as a physical and spiritual disease spurred
interesting discussions on the gender of the patients
affected by it.
Please send an abstract of 150 words with a brief CV by
May 20 to
Monica Calabritto (mcalabri@hunter.cuny.edu)
and
Elizabeth W. Mellyn (ewrussel@fas.harvard.edu)
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Monica Calabritto
Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures
Hunter College, CUNY
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
Phone (212) 772-5098
Fax: (212) 77205094
Elizabeth W. Mellyn
Harvard University
Department of History
Robinson Hall
35 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email: mcalabri@hunter.cuny.edu; ewmellyn@gmail.com
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