Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Author: K. Hodgkin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-11-28

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0230626424

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What did it mean to be mad in seventeenth-century England? This book uses vivid autobiographical accounts of mental disorder to explore the ways madness was identified and experienced from the inside, asking how certain people came to be defined as insane, and what we can learn from the accounts they wrote.


Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Author: Katharine Hodgkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1351871579

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.


Madness and Civilization

Madness and Civilization

Author: Michel Foucault

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-01-30

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0307833100

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.


Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Author: David Thorley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-08-24

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1137593121

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer than may be imagined, the author explores the social and religious frameworks by which illness was more commonly recorded and understood. The story that emerges is of illness written into personal manuscripts in prescriptive rather than original terms. This study uncovers the ways in which illness, so described, contributed to the self-patterning these texts were set up to perform.


Encountering Crises of the Mind

Encountering Crises of the Mind

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9004308539

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mental health and madness have been challenging topics for historians. The field has been marked by tension between the study of power, expertise and institutional control of insanity, and the study of patient experiences. This collection contributes to the ongoing discussion on how historians encounter mental ‘crises’. It deals with diagnoses, treatments, experiences and institutions largely outside the mainstream historiography of madness – in what might be described as its peripheries and borderlands (from medieval Europe to Cold War Hungary, from the Atlantic slave coasts to Indian princely states, and to the Nordic countries). The chapters highlight many contests and multiple stakeholders involved in dealing with mental suffering, and the importance of religion, lay perceptions and emotions in crises of mind. Contributors are Jari Eilola, Waltraud Ernst, Anssi Halmesvirta, Markku Hokkanen, Kalle Kananoja, Tuomas Laine-Frigrén, Susanna Niiranen, Anu Rissanen, Kirsi Tuohela, and Jesper Vaczy Kragh.


Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: A. Ingram

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0230306594

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.


Depression and Melancholy, 1660-1800 vol 3

Depression and Melancholy, 1660-1800 vol 3

Author: Leigh Wetherall Dickson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1040243738

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As a psychiatric term ‘depression’ dates back only as far as the mid-nineteenth century. Before then a wide range of terms were used: ‘melancholy’ carried enormous weight, and was one of the two confirmed forms of eighteenth-century insanity. This four-volume set is the first large-scale study of depression across an extensive period.


The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Author: Alan Stewart

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 0191506990

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.