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A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany
This magisterial work explores how Renaissance Germans understood and experienced madness. It focuses on the insanity of the world in general but also on specific disorders; examines the thinking on madness of theologians, jurists, and physicians; and analyzes the vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek help in pilgrimage or newly founded hospitals for the helplessly disordered. In the process, the author uses the history of madness as a lens to illuminate the history of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of poverty and social welfare, and the history of princely courts, state building, and the civilizing process. Rather than try to fit historical...
Morality and Health
From the castigation and stigmatization of victims of AIDS to our celebration of diet, exercise and fitness, the moral categorization of health and disease reflects contemporary notions that disease results from moral failure and that health is the representation of moral triumph. Ranging across academic disciplines and historical time periods, the essays in Morality and Health offer a compelling assessment of the powerful role of moral systems for judging the complex questions of risk and responsibility for disease, the experience of illness, and social and cultural responses to those who are sick. Contributors include Keith Thomas, Charles Rosenberg, Richard Shweder, Arthur Kleinman, David Mechanic, Nancy Tomes and Linda Gordon.
Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany
While the assumption of a sharp distinction between learned culture and lay society has been broadly challenged over the past three decades, the question of how ideas moved and were received and transformed by diverse individuals and groups stands as a continuing challenge to social and intellectual historians, especially with the emergence and integration of the methodologies of cultural history. This collection of essays, influenced by the scholarship of H.C. Erik Midelfort, explores the new methodologies of cultural transmission in the context of early modern Germany. Bringing together articles by European and North American scholars: this volume presents studies ranging from analyses of ...
The Primacy of the Postils
Scholarship on the German Reformation has long equated preaching with Protestantism, just as many scholars have employed sermons but usually in supplemental and unsystematic ways. Based on an analysis of over 400 standard sermon collections (postils) produced by Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists (1520-1620), this study offers the first comprehensive, systematic presentation of these works from a cross-confessional perspective. It lays to rest the notion that preaching was somehow distinctively Protestant while tracing the creation, production, use, and censorship of postils. These sermon collections were nothing less than the applied distillation of Christianity delivered on a regular basis by the clergy to the laity, and as such the most important vehicle for the dissemination of ideas in early modern Germany.
Exorcism and Enlightenment
In the late eighteenth century, Catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner (1727-1779) discovered that he had extraordinary powers of exorcism. Deciding that demons were responsible for most human ailments, he healed thousands, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic. In this book H.C. Erik Midelfort delves deeply into records of the time to explore Gassner's remarkable exorcising campaign, chronicle the official efforts to curb him, and reconstruct the sufferings of the afflicted. Gassner's activities triggered a Catholic religious revival as well as a noisy skeptical reaction. In response to those who doubted that he was really casting out demons, Gassner marshaled hundreds of eyewitness reports that seemed to prove his exorcisms really worked. Midelfort describes the enormous public controversy that resulted, and he demonstrates that the Gassner episode yields important insights into the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, the limitations of eighteenth-century debate, and the ongoing role of magic and belief in an age of scientific enlightenment.
Mapping the Present
In a late interview, Foucault, suggested that Heidegger was for him the "essential philosopher." Taking this claim seriously, Mapping the Present assesses the relationship between these two thinkers, particularly on the issue of space and history. It suggests that space and history need to be rethought, and combined as a spatial history, rather than as a history of space. In other words, space should become not merely an object of analysis, but a tool of analysis.The first half of the book concentrates on Heidegger: from the early occlusion of space, through the politically charged readings of Nietzsche and Holderlin, to the later work on art, technology and the polis which accord equal status to issues of spatiality. Foucault's work is then rethought in the light of the analysis of Heidegger, and the project of a spatial history established through re-readings of his works on madness and discipline..
Rethinking Objectivity
Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over political correctness and cultural literacy, the question "What is objectivity?" is often ignored, as if the answer were obvious. In this volume, Allan Megill has gathered essays from fourteen leading scholars in a variety of fields--history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history of science, sociology of science, feminist studies, literary studies, and accounting--to gain critical understanding of the idea of objectivity as it functions in today's world. In diverse essays the authors provide fascinating studies of objectivity in such areas...
The Devil's Tabernacle
The Devil's Tabernacle is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. Anthony Ossa-Richardson shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. Ossa-Richardson examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance--that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally...
From Sin to Insanity
In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.
