Abstract
The subject of this book is changing interpretations of madness and of the workings of the human mind in early modern times, roughly between 1560 and 1700. This is the very period when modern science arose — an event that has been characterized as ‘the mechanization of the world picture’
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or as marking the decline of the magical universe. Labels like these reflect the core of the transition from a magical-religious toward a mechanicist, calculable universe that higher powers have withdrawn from, at least in so far as they had been experienced in earlier times as a living reality. Friedrich Schiller points at this development in a poem on ‘de-deified nature’ (‘Die Götter Griechenlands’); in conscious allusion, Max Weber later dubbed the process ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (‘die Entzauberung der Welt’). In this book we consider, not primarily the transformation of the picture of the world, but of the picture of man (a shorthand term here being used in the comprehensive sense of all human beings, women definitely included). To that end we examine in considerable detail two specific rounds of debate about insanity, possessedness, and witchcraft, such as took place in England at the beginning and at the end of our chosen period. Quite deliberately focusing on the content rather than on the social context of these debates, and taking equally deliberately a heuristic rather than a reductive stance toward our source material, we seek to analyze in depth contemporary developments in diagnostics and in changing concepts of melancholia and hysteria and more generally of how the human mind was thought to operate. Along the way we encounter numerous informative data in detailed, first-hand descriptions made at the time of patients suffering from these various afflictions. We also examine the development over time of theory formation in anatomical and more generally medical treatises, as also in a flourishing genre of (to use the modern term) self-help books. The central question to pose time and again to our late-sixteenth- and mid-seventeenth century debaters, physicians, thinkers and ‘seeers’ is whether visions and trances and ecstatic states are genuine expressions of a supernatural reality, or only of the inside of the human mind — this being quite outspokenly the very question that kept numerous thinking persons at the time profoundly occupied. [Chapter 1] We gain an entrance into pertinent Renaissance patterns of thought by means of an early-17th-century book on love’s sorrows, which points toward the source of human motives as conceptualized at the time; [Chapter 2] Quietly at the background of such traditional conceptions resides something that we call here ‘the architecture of thoughts’. [Chapter 3] All this comes to the fore at a practical level in the persecution of witches and in the expulsion of demons; [Chapter 4] The variety of diagnoses encountered so far on the theoretical level becomes manifest in everyday life in a number of actual cases. We follow contemporary accounts of girls possessed and bewitched, together with the debates carried on among physicians and other people concerned with what is really going on in these cases; [Chapter 5] Theories on how the human mind works underwent a significant development between roughly the Renaissance and William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood; [Chapter 6] By mid-17th-century the breakthrough toward a scientific approach of man appears to gain momentum; [Chapter 7] In England of the second half of the seventeenth century prominent scholars come to intellectual blows with one another in a second round of debates over witchcraft; [Chapter 8] A quickly decreasing credibility of witches and demons due to the intellectual debates just mentioned also worked out on a more personal level —in diagnostics, in casuistry, and more generally speaking in how individuals experienced phenomena hitherto denoted as supernatural without more ado. [Chapter 9] What did the shift imply for something that we might call our ‘spiritual anatomy’? How have people experienced a soul, or a sense of inspiration? Are our thoughts located in our head, or do they hover around us? [epilogue] The process of disenchantment, partially yet unmistakably brought about by the rise of science of a radically new kind, had effects far beyond the domains of world picture and psychology
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