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book: Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
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Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

  • Edited by: Albrecht Classen
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2014
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Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture

About this book

This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.

Author / Editor information

Albrecht Classen, The University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.

Reviews

"Dies ist ein eindrucksvoller [...] Band. [...] Modernen Lesern führen die handwerklich soliden und vom Herausgeber akkurat redigierten Beiträge eindrucksvoll vor Augen, dass der mittelalterliche Mensch noch viel stärker im Bewusstsein einer fundamentalen Verschränkung von Leib und Seele, Mikro- und Makroskosmos, Erde und Himmel lebte."
Heiko Hartmann in: Mediaevistik 29 (2016), 320-322

Supplementary Materials

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    v
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    Introduction

    1
    Albrecht Classen
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    Constructing the Early Irish Cult of Brigit

    155
    Maedhbh M. Nic Dhonnchadha
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    A Prince Under the Spell of the Devil? The Outburst of Charles the Fat in 873 C.E.

    175
    Xenia Sosnowski
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    The Epic Hagiography as Scriptural Genre and its Pictorial Rendering in the Saint- Savin-sur-Gartempe Crypt Frescos

    206
    Rosemarie Danziger
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    Buile Shuibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland

    242
    Feargal Ó Béarra
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    At the Crossroads of Religion, Magic, Science and Written Culture

    290
    Susanna Niiranen
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    “But what is to be said of a fool?” Intellectual Disability in Medieval Thought and Culture

    314
    Eliza Buhrer
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    Body and Spirit: Martial Practices Among Monastic Orders

    344
    Lia B. Ross
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    Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages: Affective Piety in the Pricke of Conscience H.M. 128

    387
    Jean E. Jost
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    Affectus secundam scientiam: Cognitio experimentalis and Jean Gerson’s Psychology of the Whole Person

    406
    Scott L. Taylor
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    A Comparison of the Psychological Insights of Petrarch and Johann Weyer

    424
    Thomas G. Benedek
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    Mental Health in Bohemian Medical Writings of the 14th−16th Centuries

    464
    David Tomíček
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    Magic Healing and Embodied Sensory Faculties in Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum

    480
    Liliana Leopardi
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    The Invisible Diseases of Paracelsus and the Cosmic Reformation

    507
    Andrew Weeks
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    Paracelsus on Mental Health

    524
    Thomas Willard
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    Banishing “Franticks” in a Royal Wedding Celebration: Campion’s The Lords’Masque

    557
    Marilyn Sandidge
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    Order in Insanity: Eva Margaretha Frölich (d. 1692) and her National Swedish Eschatology

    579
    Bo Andersson
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    Melancholy as the Condition of Knowledge in Jakob Böhme’s Aurora

    593
    Florian Westhagen and Tünde Beatrix Karnitscher
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    The Inner Cause and the Better Choice: Anna Maria van Schurman, Self-Fashioning, and the Attraction of the Labadist Religion

    607
    Martha Moffitt Peacock
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    Melancholy, Madness, and Demonic Possession in the Early Modern West

    647
    Allison P. Coudert
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    A Postmodern Perspective on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion

    690
    Hester E. Oberman
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    List of Illustrations

    712
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    Contributors

    715
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    Index

    725
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 28, 2014
eBook ISBN:
9783110361643
Hardcover published on:
June 16, 2014
Hardcover ISBN:
9783110360875
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
6
Main content:
738
Illustrations:
27
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110361643
eBook ISBN: 9783110361643
Hardcover ISBN: 9783110360875
Keywords for this book
Mental health; madness; spirituality
Audience(s) for this book
Cultural historians; Literary historians; Historians of medicine, religion and art; Psychologists
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