Madness is the most private of human experiences, shaping how we understand the world and share our mental, emotional and sensorial life with others. It has been seen as a medical problem requiring care as well as an issue for public order requiring policing. And, throughout history, madness has been framed by religious, spiritual, moral, and artistic beliefs. Madness has always been an index of what a culture idealises, at both the social and individual scale, as functionality and health. A Cultural History of Madness presents the first systematic and global history of the subject. The work is divided into 6 volumes, with each volume covering the same topics, so readers can either study a period/volume or follow a topic across history. The volumes are:
The 6 volumes cover: Antiquity (c.600 BCE-600 CE); The Middle Ages (600-1400); The Renaissance (1400-1600); Early Modernity (1600-1789); The Age of Revolutions (1789-1900); The Modern Age (1900-present).
Themes (and chapter titles) are: madness in context; madness and health; madness embodied; lives of the mad; madness and politics; microhistories of madness; madness, creativity and representation
The page extent for the pack is approximately 1536pp. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors and an Introduction and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, and an Index.
The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Madness is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully-searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).
Muu info
The first systematic and global history of madness from antiquity to today.
Volume 1: A Cultural History of Madness in Antiquity
Edited by TBD
Volume 2: A Cultural History of Madness in the Middle Ages
Edited by TBD
Volume 3: A Cultural History of Madness in the Renaissance
Edited by TBD
Volume 4: A Cultural History of Madness in Early Modernity
Edited by TBD
Volume 5: A Cultural History of Madness in the Age of Revolutions
Edited by TBD
Volume 6: A Cultural History of Madness in the Modern Age
Edited by TBD
Chiara Thumiger is a classicist and historian of science at Kiel University, Germany. She is author of A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought. Cambridge University Press (2017) and Hidden Paths. Notions of Self, Tragic Characterization and Euripides Bacchae (BICS, London 2007); editor of Holism in Ancient Medicine and its Reception. Brill (2020); and co-editor of Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Paul of Aegina Brill (2018), Homo Patiens. Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World Brill (2015), and Eros in Ancient Greece, Oxford University Press (2013).
Jonathan Sadowsky is Theodore J. Castele Professor of Medical History at Case Western Reserve University. He is author of Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness and Colonialism in Southwest Nigeria (University of California Press, 1999); Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy (Routledge, 2016); and The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity Books, 2020). My articles have appeared in venues including The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and History of Psychiatry.
