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Author: Jeremy Schmidt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351918346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of concern in early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This book considerably furthers our understanding of the issue by examining the extensive discussions of melancholy in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century religious and moral philosophical publications, many of which have received only scant attention from modern scholars. Arguing that melancholy was considered by many to be as much a 'disease of the soul' as a condition originating in bodily disorder, Dr. Schmidt reveals how insights and techniques developed in the context of ancient philosophical and early Christian discussions of the good of the soul were applied by a variety of early modern authorities to the treatment of melancholy. The book also explores ways in which various diagnostic and therapeutic languages shaped the experience and expression of melancholy and situates the melancholic experience in a series of broader discourses, including the language of religious despair dominating English Calvinism, the late Renaissance concern with the government of the passions, and eighteenth-century debates surrounding politeness and material consumption. In addition, it explores how the shifting languages of early modern melancholy altered and enabled certain perceptions of gender. As a study in intellectual history, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul offers new insights into a wide variety of early modern texts, including literary representations and medical works, and critically engages with a broad range of current scholarship in addressing some of the central interpretive issues in the history of early modern medicine, psychiatry, religion and culture.
Author: Jeremy Schmidt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351918346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book
Book Description
Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of concern in early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This book considerably furthers our understanding of the issue by examining the extensive discussions of melancholy in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century religious and moral philosophical publications, many of which have received only scant attention from modern scholars. Arguing that melancholy was considered by many to be as much a 'disease of the soul' as a condition originating in bodily disorder, Dr. Schmidt reveals how insights and techniques developed in the context of ancient philosophical and early Christian discussions of the good of the soul were applied by a variety of early modern authorities to the treatment of melancholy. The book also explores ways in which various diagnostic and therapeutic languages shaped the experience and expression of melancholy and situates the melancholic experience in a series of broader discourses, including the language of religious despair dominating English Calvinism, the late Renaissance concern with the government of the passions, and eighteenth-century debates surrounding politeness and material consumption. In addition, it explores how the shifting languages of early modern melancholy altered and enabled certain perceptions of gender. As a study in intellectual history, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul offers new insights into a wide variety of early modern texts, including literary representations and medical works, and critically engages with a broad range of current scholarship in addressing some of the central interpretive issues in the history of early modern medicine, psychiatry, religion and culture.
Author: Thomas Moore
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250135818
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
An inspiring, dynamic way to reimagine aging, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Care of the Soul.
Author: Alina N. Feld
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739166034
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.
Author: Thomas Moore
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781592401338
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vital and the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference. Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these “dark nights” in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul’s deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life’s meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as: • The healing power of melancholy • The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony • Finding solace during illness and in aging • Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities • Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles • Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness
Author: Julius H. Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195083016
Category : Anorexia nervosa
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
This thought-provoking study examines an apparent paradox in the history of American Protestant evangelical religion. Fervent believers who devoted themselves completely to the challenges of making a Christian life, who longed to know God's rapturous love, all too often languished in despair, feeling forsaken by God. Indeed, some individuals became obsessed by guilt, terror of damnation, and the idea that they had committed an unpardonable sin. Ironically, those most devoted to fostering the soul's maturation seemingly neglected the well-being of the psyche. Drawing upon many sources, including unpublished diaries, spiritual narratives, and case studies of patients treated in nineteenth-century asylums, Julius Rubin thoroughly explores religious melancholy - as a distinctive stance toward life, a grieving over the loss of God's love, and an obsession and psycho pathology associated with the spiritual itinerary of conversion. The varieties of this spiritual sickness include sinners who would fast unto death ("evangelical anorexia nervosa"), religious suicides, and those obsessed with unpardonable sin. From colonial Puritans like Michael Wigglesworth to contemporary evangelicals like Billy Graham, Rubin shows that religious melancholy has shaped the experience of self and identity for those who sought rebirth as children of God. Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America offers a fresh and revealing look at a widely recognized phenomenon. It will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, American history, psychology, and sociology of religion.
Author: Jennifer Radden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198029675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Spanning 24 centuries, this anthology collects over thirty selections of important Western writing about melancholy and its related conditions by philosophers, doctors, religious and literary figures, and modern psychologists. Truly interdisciplinary, it is the first such anthology. As it traces Western attitudes, it reveals a conversation across centuries and continents as the authors interpret, respond, and build on each other's work. Editor Jennifer Radden provides an extensive, in-depth introduction that draws links and parallels between the selections, and reveals the ambiguous relationship between these historical accounts of melancholy and today's psychiatric views on depression. This important new collection is also beautifully illustrated with depictions of melancholy from Western fine art.
Author: Stephanie Shirilan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317062256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.
Author: Bernadette Höfer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317073878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Bernadette Höfer's innovative and ambitious monograph argues that the epistemology of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and its insistence on the primacy of analytic thought over bodily function, has surprisingly little purchase in texts by prominent classical writers. In this study Höfer explores how Surin, Molière, Lafayette, and Racine represent interconnections of body and mind that influence behaviour, both voluntary and involuntary, and that thus disprove the classical notion of the mind as distinct from and superior to the body. The author's interdisciplinary perspective utilizes early modern medical and philosophical treatises, as well as contemporary medical compilations in the disciplines of psychosomatic medicine, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis, to demonstrate that these seventeenth-century French writers established a view of human existence that fully anticipates current thought regarding psychosomatic illness.
Author: Mary Ann Lund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108982581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions.
Author: Alina N. Feld
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739166050
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book
Book Description
An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.
