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

Description

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. Contents Introduction Constructing the Early Irish Cult of Brigit A Prince Under the Spell of the Devil? The Outburst of Charles the Fat in 873 C.E. The Epic Hagiography as Scriptural Genre and its Pictorial Rendering in the Saint- Savin-sur-Gartempe Crypt Frescos Buile Shuibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland At the Crossroads of Religion, Magic, Science and Written Culture “But what is to be said of a fool?” Intellectual Disability in Medieval Thought and Culture Body and Spirit: Martial Practices Among Monastic Orders Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages: Affective Piety in the Pricke of Conscience H.M. 128 Affectus secundam scientiam: Cognitio experimentalis and Jean Gerson’s Psychology of the Whole Person A Comparison of the Psychological Insights of Petrarch and Johann Weyer Mental Health in Bohemian Medical Writings of the 14th–16th Centuries Magic Healing and Embodied Sensory Faculties in Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum Lapidum The Invisible Diseases of Paracelsus and the Cosmic Reformation Paracelsus on Mental Health Banishing “Franticks” in a Royal Wedding Celebration: Campion’s The Lords’Masque Order in Insanity: Eva Margaretha Frölich (d. 1692) and her National Swedish Eschatology Melancholy as the Condition of Knowledge in Jakob Böhme’s Aurora The Inner Cause and the Better Choice: Anna Maria van Schurman, Self-Fashioning, and the Attraction of the Labadist Religion Melancholy, Madness, and Demonic Possession in the Early Modern West A Postmodern Perspective on Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion List of Illustrations Contributors Index