This Special Collection explores its central theme of "the medieval brain" from diverse perspectives. It aims to grapple with terminology, investigate medieval source material from new angles, combine unconventional disciplinary approaches, and spark debates around the theme.
The work has emerged out of wider discussions about some of the pressing issues in the medical humanities, such as: 'What is the value of retrospective diagnosis in medieval studies?'; 'What comprises a disability versus an impairment in the Middle Ages?'; 'What should we consider to be "pathological" and what "healthy"?'; 'How did medieval people understand brain structure and brain functioning?'; 'How was mental illness conceptualised, and how were people with mental illnesses treated'; 'How are emotions constructed in medieval texts?'; and 'What insights can cognitive theories give on medieval texts?'. It has grown out of a three-day "The Medieval Brain" conference held at the University of York in March, 2017 and part-funded by the Wellcome Trust, as well as a session at the Kalamazoo International Medieval Congress entitled 'Grey Matter: Brains, Diseases, and Disorders'. These multi-disciplinary meetings invited papers presented by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds. Areas of discussion at both events, which are reflected in this collection, included but were not limited to: mental health; neurology; the history of emotions; disability and impairment; terminology and the brain; retrospective diagnosis and the Middle Ages; the care of the sick; and interdisciplinary practice and the brain.
As we research aspects of the medieval brain, we encounter complications generated by medieval thought and twenty-first century medicine and neurology alike, and this collection explores those complications. Our understanding of modern-day neurology, psychiatry, disability studies, and psychology rests on shifting sands. Not only do we struggle with medieval terminology concerning the brain, but we must connect it with a constantly-moving target of modern understanding - and this collection reflects this.
This Special Collection is edited by Dr Deborah Thorpe of Trinity College Dublin.
The Medieval Brain
Mental Health and Homicide in Medieval English Trials
Wendy J. Turner
2018-09-12 Volume 4 • Issue 2 • 2018 • 11
Also a part of:
Interrogating Green Space in Medieval Monasticism: Position, Powers and Politics
James L. Smith
2019-06-13 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 41
Also a part of:
Tears for Fears: Alienation and Authority in the World of Benedict of Aniane
Frances Trzeciak and Rutger Kramer
2019-09-09 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 53
Also a part of:
Brain Disease or Emotional Distress? Modern Psychology, Ancient Asceticism, and the Hermeneutics of DSM-5
Klaas Huijbregts and Veronika Wieser
2022-07-18 Volume 8 • Issue 2 • 2022
Also a part of:
Special Collections
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Humour as a Human Right
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: Opening Museum Collections, Project Data and Digital Images for Research, Query and Discovery
Literature as Imaginary Archive: Ephemera and Modern Literary Production
Caliban's Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University