2009 Conferences
Spring 2009
"Manifesting Madness: Historical Interpretations of the Exceptional, the Marginal, and the 'Normal'"
Friday, April 24, 2009. Convener: Anne Koenig (CHS Fellow)
11:00 a.m Welcome and opening remarks by T.H. Breen (Director of CHS, Northwestern University)
11:15 a.m. Keynote Address by H.C. Erik Midelfort (University of Virginia), author of Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 15621684:The Social and Intellectual Foundations (1972), Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (1994), A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany(1999), and Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of 18th-Century Germany (2005). Both works on German madness received the Roland Bainton Award for the best book of the year.
“Schwermuth and Unsinnigkeit: Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706-1751)
and the Difficulties of Vernacular Psychiatry”
1:30 p.m. First Panel Presentations
- Anne Koenig (NU)-"Hildegard of Bingen: A Twelfth-Century Psychiatrist?"
- Beth Condie-Pugh (Northwestern University)--"Finding Pazzia: Madness in Late-Renaissance Italy"
- Megan McFadden (Northwestern University)--"'Alas sweet lady, what imports this song?": Musical Performance of Feminine Madness on the Jacobean Stage"
- Comments by William Monter (Northwestern University), whose books include European Witchcraft (1969), Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (1983), Frontiers of Heresy: the Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (1990), and Bewitched Duchy: Lorraine and its Dukes, 1477-1736 (2007).
3:00 p.m. Second Panel Presentations
- Rachel Ponce (University of Chicago)--"'Unnatural Murder' in the Early American Republic: Madness, Morality, and Family"
- Darcy Heuring (Northwestern University)--"The Kingston Lunatic Asylum and Responsibility in Colonial Jamaica"
- Comments by Anne Harrington (Harvard University), author of Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), Reenchanted Science (1997) and The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2007).
5:00 p.m. Closing comments and reception.