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Call for PapersMELANCHOLIA/ÆThe religious experience of the ‘disease of the soul’ and its definitions inthe early modern period: censorship, dissent and self-representationPresentationIn its various historic-artistic, medical, literary, philosophical andpsychological manifestations, melancholy has been the subject of a vastliterature. Moreover, ‘melancholy’ – the word itself – is a polysemic termhistorically associated with a large variety of groups of distinct meanings.In particular, it underwent a sort of semantic expansion between the 16thand 17th century. It became the name of what the physiologic-medicaltradition, going back to antiquity, considered a humoral pathology of theblack bile, of an experience of ‘moral’ suffering and also of a mental oremotional disorder, a discomfort sometimes described by sufferers as‘abandonment’, ‘dark night’, ‘dryness’, ‘sorrow’ etc. and often lived out inimitatio Christi. In the light of all this, the notion of melancholy became anestablished means for carefully analyzing a large range of cases and theirvarious symptoms and discerning the origin (whether divine, demonic ornatural) of spiritual suffering; at the same time, it became a polemicalcategory for transgression and individual or collective patterns ofbehaviour that were regarded as abnormal. Within the spheres ofmedicine, theology and law, the idea emerged that melancholy may be theexpression of dissent, of the subject’s incapacity or unwillingness toconform to social rules and customs, and went as far as to polemicallypresent melancholy as a collective phenomenon of given social groups, todenote a ‘national’ malaise (English malady) or, by reference toseventeenth-century political and religious instability, to designate the‘disease of the century’.The proposed seminar aims at exploring the different meanings of theterm ‘melancholy’ in early modern religion, both Protestant and Catholic.One of its main purposes will be to enquire into, clarify, and emphasizeboth elements of continuity and what was specific to each of the diversediscourses on melancholy within the historical, socio-cultural, political,geographical and linguistic contexts that framed its production.It will be, therefore, a question of analysing the ways these discoursescame to be structured, who made use of them and how, how theyintersected one another – for instance, what points of contact existedamong the medical, philosophical, literary, artistic and religious discourses– how they changed through time and what forms of social practice andtypes of texts were involved. Given this point of view, an interdisciplinaryand transcultural approach will be privileged, one which goes beyond thetraditional confessional perspective to emphasize intersections andcomparisons even among different areas of historical study from culturalto gender history, from the history of medicine to that of emotions.Proposals may be presented (although not exclusively) on the followingthemes either in the form of individual case studies or in a moretheoretical and methodological mode.1) Analysis of the language(s) of melancholy with particular attentionto the medical and spiritual treatments proposed for itsunderstanding, examination and/or cure. We would like to reflecton individual and group perceptions of spiritual suffering, ondiscursive definitions of its causes (natural and supernatural alike)and on the lines of reasoning that contributed to thestigmatization/censorship of the experience or, conversely, to itsspiritual appraisal. Proposed topics: melancholy and devotion,melancholy as a spiritual trial, tristitia spiritualis, religiousinterpretations and elaborations of the theme of suicide, body/souland ‘anatomies of the soul’, etc.2) The derogatory use of the term ‘melancholy’ by the variousconfessional orthodoxies to stigmatize the unbridgeable gap thatseparated not only individuals but also entire groups from theimposed imperatives of social and religious models as well asdeplete the term’s potential subversive power. We intend to defineand study the procedures that excluded dissidents from thecommunity and thereby fixed the borders of rightness but which, byso doing, often, paradoxically, provoked the opposite effect oflegitimizing groups or individual ‘sectarians’ or ‘eccentrics’, whoended up identifying precisely the stigma as the distinctive featureof their own identity. Proposed topics: melancholy as the ‘disease ofthe century’, melancholy and atheism, the ‘monasteries’ sickness’,the critique of scrupulous and zealous religiosity, etc.3) The connection between melancholy, demonic possession and‘inordinate devotions’ provided the leitmotiv for muchcontemporary, disputed spirituality and mysticism within theCatholic ground. On the other hand, debate in both Catholicism andvarious Protestant contexts on melancholy combined with the widerdebate concerning religious fanaticism or ‘enthusiasm’, which termswere used to label chiliastic groups, radical sects, the early Quakersand the Camisards, all of whom became the object of detailedtheological, social and medical analyses in an attempt to distinguishbetween true and false inspiration, the natural and supernaturaldimensions and melancholy and possession. Proposed topics:melancholy as a sign of fanaticism, enthusiasm or millenarianism;melancholy and demonic possession; melancholy and ‘pretendedsanctity’; etc.The seminar will be held in Venice, 28-29 November 2013 (date to beconfirmed); its proceedings will be published either in a monographicissue of an academic periodical or as a dedicated volume.Proposals will be considered for 20-minute papers and/or writtencontributions (up to a maximum length of 40,000 characters).Scientific committee: Alessandro Arcangeli, Federico Barbierato, AdelisaMalena, Chiara Petrolini, Lisa Roscioni, Xenia Von Tippelskirch, DanielaSolfaroli Camillocci, Stefano Villani.Proposals for papers or written contributions (max. 3000 characters),supplemented by a short cv and bibliography, must be sent by 15February 2013 to Adelisa Malena (adelisa.malena@unive.it) or LisaRoscioni (lisa.roscioni@unipr.it).Languages: Italian, English, French.If funding will be available, hospitality will be offered to speakers. Areimbursement of travel expenses also may be provided pending theavailability of budgetary resources.Further information: emodir@emodir.nethttp://www.emodir.net/