Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: Madness and Melancholia: Society and Medicine in Late Medieval Germany
|
Dyan Elliott
|
About
My dissertation explores how mental illness was understood and treated in premodern Germany. By using a variety of late medieval German sources, from town records and medical writings to miracle accounts and popular literature, my work brings into focus a network of complex understandings of and reactions to mental illness. My work argues that medieval German authorities dealt with "madness" with far greater frequency and nuance than previously supposed. Further, the urban mad in particular helped to define and to map the town itself. They not only physically occupied the spaces on the towns margins: the walls, the hospitals, and the prisons, but their presence also helped carve out the limits of urban social responsibility. Ultimately, my findings challenge us to examine critically how we construct our categories of sanity and how we deal with problems of mental distress.
