Managing Melancholy

From the time of the Reformations, Lutheran religion was suspected of stimulating fear, anxiety and, worst of all, melancholy. The allegations often came from religious polemics – from confessional opponents in the early modern period, to proponents of religious criticism in modern times. This volume uses the management of melancholy as a prism to historical examinations of the dynamics of the disciplines theology, medicine and law in early modern Nordic Lutheran societies, alongside the intersection of the history of knowledge with histories from below. It combines conceptual histories with more empirically focused case-based histories of melancholy in practice which draw out the voices of ordinary people from between the lines of pastoral care, court interrogations and state administrative archives.

Legacies and negotiations of Lutheran anthroplogyMelancholy held a flexible position in early modern discourse and clinical practice both as an idea connected to inner feeling and an explanation for bodily and mental disturbances. This ambivalence became a vehicle for developing debates about self-examination and salvation, while also pushing the parameters of what legally and culturally constituted mentally impaired states. These developments were born from the dynamics of the emerging differentiated disciplines of theology, medicine and law, but were also the product of the way ordinary people thought about and dealt with troubled mental states in Nordic Lutheran societies. This volume’s geographical and temporal focus allows us to not only grapple with the deeper specificity of melancholy and its ambiguity in an important transitional period, but also allows us to develop an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together scholars working with methods from theology, forensic psychiatry, church-, medical-, legal-, literary-, social- and maritime history. In turn, this allows us to integrate ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches while also establishing national comparisons that expose early modern intersections across cultural and disciplinary contexts.