Nebuchadnezzar, gone mad, grovels like a beast of the earth; he gropes for his crown. Engraving, 16--.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
GENERAL EDITORS
Jonathan Sadowsky, Case Western Reserve University, USA
Chiara Thumiger, Kiel University, Germany
AIMS & SCOPE
Madness has strikingly ambiguous images in human history. All human societies seem to have a concept of madness, yet those concepts show extraordinary variance. Madness is widely seen, across time and cultures, as a medical problem, yet it often gestures towards other domains, including the religious, the moral, and the artistic. Madness impinges on the most personal and private sphere of human experience: how we understand the world, express ourselves about it, and share our mental, emotional and sensorial life with others. At the same time, madness is a public concern, often seeming to demand public response, at least by the immediate community, and often by the state. Madness is usually to some extent a disability, something that compromises functioning, yet is often also seen as a source of brilliance and inspiration. Madness is, virtually by definition, characterized by anomalous behavior, affect, and beliefs in any given context, and yet—partly because of this, and partly in spite of it—madness can be the most telling index of what a given society regards as normal or idealises as paradigm of functionality and health.
In the ancient world, for example, reference to madness was used to qualify extraordinary characters, as in the famous case of the ‘melancholic’ as gifted individual, or of mania as associated to divine or poetic inspiration; unique experiences (religious, especially initiatory, but also creative and emotional); socio-political status (e.g., guilt deemed worthy of severe punishment, pollution); illness and bodily disturbance. These elements and perspectives are not necessarily opposed or mutually exclusive. Indeed, in pre-technological society they often support and qualify one another, making the interpretation of madness profoundly different from what it would look like in modern times. And yet madness in modernity shows some parallel dualities. Attempts to cast madness as disease have had uneven success in reducing stigma, and madness remains laden with moral meanings. Madness in modernity is at once considered a problem that compromises a person’s full flourishing, even as it retains an association with creative gifts. The mad are people whose cognitive realities defy convention. Yet, from the “influencing machine”—a delusion of being controlled by a diabolical device (described by psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk in the early twentieth century) to the “Truman Show Delusion” (the false belief that one is a widely-watched participant in a reality TV show, in the early twenty first century) the content of madness often reflects the preoccupations, social habits, and technologies of an era.
Madness is a subject of science and the arts; it is shaped by the universals of human biology and yet marked by vast cultural differences; it can afflict people of all social stations, and yet its social distribution is unequal and thus a prism through which inequalities can be viewed. The various approaches and subjects sketched below, such as politics, history of medicine, cultural history, social history, microhistory, thus need to be placed firmly in dialogue with one another. If interdisciplinarity is arguably a key ingredient in any sound historical approach, the case of madness is a prime illustration for its necessity.
In this series, we propose a wide-ranging historical probe of these ambiguities. We plan to make the series as global in scope as available evidence, and the state of scholarship, will allow. Each individual author will have, of course, his or her own thematic, methodological and regional specialization; volume editors will, however, be encouraged to seek out contributors who have a strong command of the global and comparative literature, and who are enthusiastic about incorporating it. The ideal volume editor will also share our desire to strike a balance towards a multi-focal, and not Europe-centered perspective on madness, thus making sure the cultural geographies addressed by chapters are as varied and representative as possible.
Vol 1: A Cultural History of Madness in Antiquity (c.600 BCE-600 CE)
Vol 2: A Cultural History of Madness in the Medieval Age (600‒1400)
Vol 3: A Cultural History of Madness in the Renaissance (1400‒1600)
Vol 4: A Cultural History of Madness in Early Modernity (1600-1789)
Vol 5: A Cultural History of Madness in the Age of Revolutions (1789-1900)
VoL 6: A Cultural History of Madness in the Modern Age (1900- the present)