Review of a work quite pertinent to the interests of this list...

- Noah

-----Original Message----- From: The Medieval Review 
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Review Sent: dinsdag 16 oktober 2012 17:04 To: Marianne Subject: TMR 
12.10.16

Haskell, Diseases of the Imagination (Archambeau) Haskell, Yasmin, ed. 
<i>Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern 
Period</i>. Series: Early European Research 1200-1650. Turnhout: 
Brepols, 2011. Pp. xxvi, 424. EUR. 95. ISBN-13: 9782503527963.
Reviewed by Nicole Archambeau University of California, Santa Barbara 
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Books of collected essays are at their best when they allow readers to 
enter into the conversation of specialists and see how they develop both 
broad themes and specific issues. <i>Diseases of the Imagination and 
Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period</i> brings together 
excellent essays on a long list of diseases, including madness, 
melancholy, possession, hypochondria, lycanthropy, vampirism, and 
fatigue. These are diseases, as the title suggests, of the imagination, 
but which also could be dismissed as imaginary. Because of this 
diversity, the book has something for those interested in emotion, 
magic, witchcraft, and medical practice. And the essays often cross the 
boundaries of these topics in useful ways.

What links these diverse diseases in the broadest sense is the 
imagination. For the early modern period (as well as much of the 
medieval), the imagination was a rational faculty located in the brain 
and responsible for making sense of sensory information. This faculty 
could become diseased when the bodily organs produced too much mist and 
vapor. The obscuring vapor rose to the head and could create the diverse 
false imaginings. This simple definition belies the complexity of how 
theologians, natural philosophers, physicians, and sufferers used the 
imagination to understand behavior and thought, however. The 
introductory apparatus (preface, introduction, and envoi--which one can 
usefully read before as well as after the essays) starts the 
conversation about who defines imagination at various historical moments 
and how it appears in diverse genres. The essays then dig deep into 
particular sources to look at imagination through the words of healing 
practitioners, theologians, su fferers, family, and legal officials from 
the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

The preface and envoi place the book squarely in the history of 
psychology, though they use different methods. The preface by German 
Berrios provides a historical long durée for the concept of imagination, 
emphasizing that "its definition was changing all the time" (xix). He 
highlights the culturally specific nature of psychology, the fact that 
"mental symptoms and disorders are constructs" of their time and place 
with little or no "genetic origin" (xxii). For Berrios, therefore, the 
collected essays reveal the process of disease creation. They can and 
should inform modern psychologists and others about the cultural and 
social processes by which healing practitioners, sufferers, and others 
create disease, as seen in the ongoing revision of the DSM IV. The envoi 
by George Rousseau sketches a quick ethnography of hypochondria and the 
<i>malades imaginaires</i> on the cusp of the modern era to highlight 
changes in terminology and lived experience. In many ways, this moment 
is where disease of the imagination become imaginary disease.

Yasmin Haskell's introduction argues that the book allows the reader to 
explore the wide range of "learned and lay discourses, as well as 
international, national, local, and personal perspectives" on the 
changing ideas about imagination (7). As she points out important themes 
that emerge in each essay, two themes emerge as important unifying 
threads. First, the essays explore "the nexus between diseases of the 
imagination and social and personal morality" (15). This theme helps the 
reader follow changing cultural perceptions about links among body, 
soul, mind, and spirit. Second, for Haskell, the essays also explore 
mechanisms by which imagination can become diseased or deranged, 
including the transmission of diseases of the imagination from one 
person to another.

Like the authors of the preface and envoi, Haskell remarks on the 
surprising robustness of categories like delirium, melancholy, and 
madness in their relationship to imagination. And the first three essays 
delve directly into changing definitions of imagination and melancholy 
in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Guido Guglioni builds on 
the work of Michael Allen to argue that Marsilio Ficino, using 
neoplatonic ideas of Iamblichus and Plotinus, emphasized spiritual 
medicine for physical health because of how the body and soul interact 
through <i>imaginatio</i> and <i>phantasia</i>. Guglioni builds a 
nuanced structure of terms for imagination and imaginary as they appear 
Ficino's work. He emphasizes, as do many authors in this collection, how 
changes in terminology reflected theologians' adoption of increasingly 
medical views of demonic influence on man.

Angus Gowland's essay explores Renaissance ideas about melancholy, 
primarily through discussions of dreaming. He grounds arguments about 
dreaming in medieval medicine and argues for a strong continuity of 
these ideas into the seventeenth century. His useful and thorough essay 
first sets the groundwork for the ways Renaissance scholars brought 
together Aristotelian and Galenic ideas about imagination, melancholy, 
and dreams. The bulk of the essay then describes how scholars merged a 
Christian theological component into the Aristotelian and Galenic 
discussion of divinatory dreams. Ideas here were far more heterodox, 
including explanatory schema of melancholic imagination that rejected 
Aristotelian theory, modified it, or used it novel ways.

Donald Beecher also analyzes a wide array of theological and medical 
texts to view changing ideas about the imagination as the entry point of 
demonic influence on the body. For Beecher, the distinction between 
theology and medicine blurs as theological treatises on heresy, 
witchcraft, and possession increasingly incorporated medical views in an 
attempt to empiricize the demonic, as he put it. At the same time, 
scholars of medicine attempted to assimilate demonic influence (which 
could cause both physical disease and delusions) into discourses of 
melancholy and mania. Beecher's wide-ranging perspective shows how even 
though competing diagnoses of possession, witchcraft, or madness could 
require different kinds of healing practitioners with different methods, 
the medical emphasis of theological texts and the orthodoxy of medical 
practitioners could remove some of the tension.

Word count limitations mean I cannot address all thirteen essays, nor 
all of the intriguing themes that develop. One of the most interesting 
themes, however, is who gets to decide what a group of symptoms reveals. 
Sharon Strocchia's essay explores competing diagnoses of possession and 
melancholy from the view of the sufferers and their care-givers--in this 
case, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian nuns. She deftly weaves 
individual stories to reveal the flexibility of both medicalized 
melancholy and demonic possession to describe the emotional struggles of 
cloistered nuns, many of whom did not chose the vocation but were placed 
in convents by their families. Stroccia highlights the moment of 
diagnosis (always difficult between possession and madness) as a place 
where nuns and their abbesses actively asserted their authority within 
the cloister and against outside authority figures. Strocchia paints a 
vivid picture of abbesses and nuns struggling with the gamut of melan 
cholic behavior, which could include fever, sadness, and frenzy, trying 
to determine if the sufferer needed severe penitence, an exorcist, or 
medical care, and attempting to keep the behavior from spreading to 
others. At the same time, these women used their suffering and their 
ability to identify and treat disease as moments to negotiate with the 
world outside the cloister.

Thomas Rütten also looks at this issue of who has the ability and 
expertise to understand a sufferer's symptoms. Rütten provides a close 
analysis of a medical <i>observatio</i> by the sixteenth-century Dutch 
physician, Pieter van Foreest. The highly narrative <i>observatio</i> 
concerned two young men--one melancholic in temperament, one melancholic 
due to lifestyle. While both men die, the one who developed melancholy 
through his lifestyle as an over-studious and underfed student appeared 
to commit suicide and was denied Christian burial. Foreest, however, 
through both local knowledge and medical training correctly diagnosed 
the young man's melancholy, which made him mad in the eyes of the law, 
not responsible for his actions, and therefore a candidate for Christian 
burial. In the <i>observatio</i>, Foreest emphasizes his knowledge as a 
doctor qualifies him to make the proper diagnosis that restores order 
and dignity to disordered situation.

Several of the essays locate ideas of diseased imagination firmly in 
their historical contexts. Hans de Waardt does this to great effect as 
he carefully positions the work of another sixteenth-century physician, 
Johan Weir's <i>De ira morbo</i>, as "a medical essay...an ethical 
discourse, and...a barely disguised anti-Spanish pamphlet" (273). Like 
Foreest, Weir's causes of ire are both internal and external--in a 
person's temperament, diet, and behavior. Weir's text posits cures and 
remedies through many classical examples of the proper way for a ruler 
to live to avoid falling into destructive tyranny brought on by deranged 
anger. Analysis of Wier's dedication to Count Hermann of Neuenahr 
reveals that Wier wrote in response to Spanish attacks of the 1560s and 
1570s, which he described as an epidemic that had caused more 
devastation than any other pestilence. And analysis of quotations in the 
text show Wier's indebtedness to Sebastian Castellio, a famous 
sixteenth-century spokesman for religious tolerance.

Koen Vermeir's lively look at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 
vampire tracts bring the reader into early modern debates between 
imagination and imaginary and into different kinds of questions about 
magic, witchcraft, demons, and the occult. Vermeir reveals early 
attempts to understand the vampire not simply as the disordered 
imagination of people who believe in them, but as something that could 
exist in nature, explained in part through an alternative metaphysics 
inspired by Paracelsus. Vermeir's analysis of Michael Ranft's <i>De 
Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis</i> explores an imagination that can 
live on after death and can affect other bodies.

One leaves this conversation among experts with the sense that 
imagination in the early modern period was not just a flexible catch- 
all, but a concept subject to strenuous pressures of co-construction by 
diverse scholars and sufferers. Its use in medical, literary, and 
chronicle sources reveal the need for a way to understand relationships 
between the natural and supernatural, the body and soul, and the living 
and the dead. The imagination, when it became diseased or disordered, 
could be a path for demons, a producer of vapors, or source of 
hysteria--or all three at once.

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