Culture, Emotions, Identities: Europe and the Oriental Other in the late Middle Ages, Dr Mirko Sardelic (The University of Western Australia)
Date: Wednesday, 4 November
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: Room 714, Level 7, 757 Swanston St, The University of Melbourne
Register: http://bit.ly/1NVkULW
The thirteenth century is the time when Europe rediscovered Asia, stimulated mostly by the Mongol invasion of 1241/2. This paper is an introduction into the study of the development of contacts between European and Asian cultures. The author discusses the role of culture and emotions in framing identity during this period of intensified Eurasia cross-cultural exchange. He suggests that these three categories are critical in understanding European responses to the Oriental Other in the thirteenth century and might provide a workable model for investigating later contacts in Southeast Europe.
Dr Mirko Sardelić is an Honorary Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CHE, based at The University of Western Australia. His doctoral thesis (2013) dealt with the European perception of the Mongols in the 13th century, though lately his research has shifted more towards early relations between Southeast Europe and the Ottoman Empire (up to the late 16th century).
http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/researchers/mirko-sardelic/
“Sexuality and Emotions in Early Modern Catholic Discourse: Manuals for Confessors, Moral Theology Treatises and Inquisition Trials in the 16th and 17th Centuries”, Professor Fernanda Alfieri (Bruno Kessler Foundation; Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento)
Date: Wednesday, 11 November
Time: 6:15pm
Venue: Room 602, Level 6, 757 Swanston St, The University of Melbourne
Register: http://bit.ly/1NVkULW
In early modern theology, emotions (affectus) are considered crucial in the biological and cognitive activities of human life. Every action is accompanied by movements of material and immaterial substances in the body, conveyed by the powers of the soul. Such movements, while making vital processes possible, influence the complex system of body and soul which is thought to be the human being, destabilizing the balance of humours, heat and humidity, and enriching the conscience with new moral nuances. The strongest emotions are the ones connected with reproduction, involving a combination of desires, pleasures and production of physiological substances which are thought to deeply affect human beings. A whole moral system is constructed around sexuality and its emotional correlates. The paper will explore this construction in early modern theological discourse, paying special attention to the period after the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
Fernanda Alfieri is a Research Fellow at the Italian-German Historical Institute (FBK-ISIG) and Adjunct Professor at the University of Trento. She is particularly interested in the conflicts and interactions between medicine and theology in Early Modern Europe (16th-19th Century). She is writing a book on a case of demonic possession in early 19th-Century Rome, which created much debate within the Curia and the Medical College and had strong public impact. Her first book, Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI-XVII) [In the married couple’s bedroom. Tomás Sánchez, marriage and sexuality (16th-17th centuries)] (2010), analyzes theological discourses on sexuality in Early Modern moral casuistry.
“Pain: The Forgotten Emotion”, Dr Rob Boddice (Freie Universität Berlin; Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Date: Wednesday, 18 November
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: Room 601, Level 6, 757 Swanston St, The University of Melbourne
Register: http://bit.ly/1NVkULW
Recent neuroscientific research into the way pain works has placed renewed focus on emotions as part of the brain circuitry that gives meaning to painful experience. Biopsychosocial models of pain in humans have drawn attention to the influence of fear, anger and anxiety, especially in accounts of susceptibility to chronic pain. But despite the turn to affect in the neurosciences, there remains a tendency to reduce emotions to mere functions of the brain, or to label them as human constants. In short, current medical approaches to pain still underemphasise the substantive interrelationship of body, brain and society in the construction of meaningful experiences of pain. Efforts to put emotions back into the picture have not taken into account the rich cultural history of pain, which is replete with examples of the way that pain is expressed in context, according to contingent emotional repertoires. In this paper I offer a brief sketch of the history of colloquial and conceptual knowledge of pain as an emotional experience, in some ways endorsing the direction of current pain research, but in other ways offering a corrective that may indicate a use for the medical humanities and the history of emotions for the management of pain in a clinical setting.
Dr Rob Boddice is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Department of History and Cultural Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Research Fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The author and editor of a number of books, Boddice’s most recent volumes include Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Palgrave, 2014) and Edward Jenner (History Press, 2015). His next monograph, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization, will be published in the History-of-Emotions series at University of Illinois Press in the Spring. His Pain: A Very Short Introduction will be published by Oxford University Press next year. And The History of Emotions will appear in Manchester University Press’s ‘Historical Approaches’ series in 2017.
“Play and Playfulness in English 16th-Century Literature and Culture”, Professor Ros King (University of Southampton, UK)
Date: Monday, 23 November
Time: 12:00pm-2:00pm
Venue: Room 714, Level 7, 757 Swanston St, The University of Melbourne
Register: http://bit.ly/1NVkULW
Recent work on the history of childhood from prehistory to Victorian times has successfully refuted earlier notions that a) in times of high infant mortality parents did not invest emotionally in their children and b) that medieval and early modern children were regarded as mini adults. But playfulness, readily observable in all young living mammals, is more difficult to document historically. Until recently, children’s play objects have not normally been of great cost or intrinsic value. Toys were usually made of perishable material and unlikely to survive in the archaeological record or are improvised from other non-play objects, and therefore invisible as toys to non-players.
Imaginative play that is not object based is even harder to document, and has been particularly under recognised as a function of adult behaviour and intellectual and social development. Indeed since classical times, far from being seen as an intellectual benefit, playfulness has usually been collocated with wantonness and idleness. In the religious writing of the reformation it is simply sinful. At the same time, there has been a tendency in literary studies to assume that plays as art forms are merely mimetic, reflecting and bound by their societies of origin.
This paper will revisit Huizinga’s Homo Ludens in the light of recent scientific research in ethology and brain science as well as new thinking in the arts of rhetoric—specifically phantasy, irony, ekphrasis, and enargeia—to identify and evaluate play and playfulness in sixteenth-century English dramatic and non dramatic literature. It is part of a larger study on the value and function of play in human history, science and culture.
Ros King is Professor of English Studies at the University of Southampton. A musician and theatre director as well as an academic, she has worked as a dramaturg with Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the English Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz (California). She has edited a range of Early Modern plays and poems, including The Works of Richard Edwards (Manchester University Press), and revised editions of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (for CUP), and Marlowe’s Faustus (New Mermaids). She was co-editor (with Paul Franssen) of the collection Shakespeare and War. Her monographs include Shakespeare: a Beginner’s Guide, and Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain.
