Download or read book Alone Before God written by Pamela Voekel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on cemetery burials in late-eighteenth-century Mexico, Alone Before God provides a window onto the contested origins of modernity in Mexico. By investigating the religious and political debates surrounding the initiative to transfer the burials of prominent citizens from urban to suburban cemeteries, Pamela Voekel challenges the characterization of Catholicism in Mexico as an intractable and monolithic institution that had to be forcibly dragged into the modern world. Drawing on the archival research of wills, public documents, and other texts from late-colonial and early-republican Mexico, Voekel describes the marked scaling-down of the pomp and display that had characterized baroque Catholic burials and the various devices through which citizens sought to safeguard their souls in the afterlife. In lieu of these baroque practices, the new enlightened Catholics, claims Voekel, expressed a spiritually and hygienically motivated preference for extremely simple burial ceremonies, for burial outside the confines of the church building, and for leaving their earthly goods to charity. Claiming that these changes mirrored a larger shift from an external, corporate Catholicism to a more interior piety, she demonstrates how this new form of Catholicism helped to initiate a cultural and epistemic shift that placed the individual at the center of knowledge. Breaking with the traditional historiography to argue that Mexican liberalism had deeply religious roots, Alone Before God will be of interest to specialists in Latin American history, modernity, and religion.

Download or read book Mystical Bedlam written by Michael MacDonald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981-08-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical Bedlam explores the social history of insanity of early seventeenth-century England by means of a detailed analysis of the records of Richard Napier, a clergyman and astrological physician, who treated over 2000 mentally disturbed patients between 1597 and 1634. Napier's clients were drawn from every social rank and his therapeutic techniques included all the types of psychological healing practised at the time. His vivid descriptions of his clients' afflictions and complaints illuminate the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people. This book goes beyond simply analysing mental disorder in a seventeenth-century astrological and medical practice. It reveals contemporary attitudes towards family life, describes the appeal of witchcraft and demonology to ordinary villagers, and explains the social and intellectual basis for the eclectic blend of scientific, magical, and religious therapies practised before the English Revolution. Not only is it a contribution to the history of medicine but also a survey of some of the darkest regions of the mental world of the English people of the seventeenth century.

Download or read book Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico written by Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century in New Spain witnessed major changes: among these, one of the most significant was the adoption of French customs among the upper groups of society in response to the spreading ideas of the Enlightenment. These new ideas, it has been assumed, brought a relaxation of social customs. But Viqueira Alban takes this assumption, and raises the question: Was it really a period of relaxation of social customs, in this age of growth without development? He discovered that the movement of rural workers and their families to urban centers created a concern within the church and government hierarchy about the threat of disorder, leading to the need for new social restraints. This new text is ideal for colonial Latin American survey courses, courses on the history of Mexico and Latin American literature, and courses on the popular culture and social history of Latin America.

Download or read book Mad for God written by Sara Tilghman Nalle and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Convinced he was the Elijah Messiah, the Spanish peasant Bartolomé Sánchez believed that God had sent him in divine retribution for the crimes committed by the Inquisition and the Church. Sánchez's vocal and intolerable religious deviance quickly landed him in the very court he believed he was sent to destroy. Fortunately for him, the first inquisitor assigned to his case came to believe that Sánchez was not guilty by virtue of insanity, and tried to collect the proof that would save his life. For seven years, Sánchez shuttled between jails, hospitals, and his home village while his fate hung in the balance. Nalle convincingly evokes the compassion of Sánchez's first inquisitor, Pedro Cortes, as he struggled to save his prisoner's life, and argues that the Spanish, compared to other Europeans of the day, were remarkably rational and humane when dealing with the mentally ill. A gripping tale of madness and religious conviction, Mad for God offers new historical insight into the ongoing debate over the nature of religious inspiration, insanity, and criminal responsibility.

Download or read book The Post Revolutionary Self written by Jan Goldstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the French Revolution, as attempts to restore political stability to France repeatedly failed, a group of concerned intellectuals identified a likely culprit: the prevalent sensationalist psychology, and especially the flimsy and fragmented self it produced. They proposed a vast, state-run pedagogical project to replace sensationalism with a new psychology that showcased an indivisible and actively willing self, or moi. As conceived and executed by Victor Cousin, a derivative philosopher but an academic entrepreneur of genius, this long-lived project singled out the male bourgeoisie for training in selfhood. Granting everyone a self in principle, Cousin and his disciples deemed workers and women incapable of the introspective finesse necessary to appropriate that self in practice. Beginning with a fresh consideration of the place of sensationalism in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Jan Goldstein traces a post-Revolutionary politics of selfhood that reserved the Cousinian moi for the educated elite, outraged Catholics and consigned socially marginal groups to the ministrations of phrenology. Situating the Cousinian moi between the fragmented selves of eighteenth-century sensationalism and twentieth-century Freudianism, Goldstein suggests that the resolutely unitary self of the nineteenth century was only an interlude tailored to the needs of the post-Revolutionary bourgeois order.

Download or read book A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. It surveys the diversity of views about the structure and nature of the movement, pointing toward the possibilities for further research. The volume presents a series of comprehensive treatments on the process and interpretation of Catholic Enlightenment in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Malta, Italy and the Habsburg territories. An introductory overview explores the varied meanings of Catholic Enlightenment and situates them in a series of intellectual and social contexts. The topics covered in this book are crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place not only of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, but also for the social and religious history of modern Europe. Contributors include: Jeffrey D. Burson, Richard Butterwick, Frans Ciappara, Harm Klueting, Ulrich L. Lehner, Michael Printy, Mario Rosa, Evergton Sales Souza, and Andrea J. Smidt.

Download or read book Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico written by Javier Villa-Flores and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of emotions is a new approach to social history, and this book is the first in English to systematically examine emotions in colonial Mexico. It is easy to assume that emotions are a given, unchanging aspect of human psychology. But the emotions we feel reflect the times in which we live. People express themselves within the norms and prescriptions particular to their society, their class, their ethnicity, and other factors. The essays collected here chart daily life through the study of sex and marriage, love, lust and jealousy, civic rituals and preaching, gambling and leisure, prayer and penance, and protest and rebellion. The first part of the book deals with how individuals experienced emotions on a personal level. The second group of essays explores the role of institutions in guiding and channeling the expression and the objects of emotions.

Download or read book Magistrates of the Sacred written by William B. Taylor and published by El Colegio de Michoacán A.C.. This book was released on 1996 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an extraordinarily rich account of the social, political, cultural, and religious relationships between parish priests and their parishioners in colonial Mexico. It thus explores a wide range of issues, from competing interpretations of religious dogma and beliefs, to questions of practical ethics and daily behavior, to the texture of social and authority relations in rural communities, to how all these things changed over time and over place, and in relation to reforms instigated by the state.

Download or read book Containing the Poor written by Silvia Marina Arrom and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of poverty in Mexico City, based on a study of a poorhouse designed to incarcerate and train "deserving" beggars to be productive and responsible citizens.

Download or read book The Catholic Enlightenment written by Ulrich L. Lehner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time. Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda. In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again. Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self written by Raymond Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.

Download or read book A Mad People s History of Madness written by Dale Peterson and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 1982-03-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, "a London citizen" is sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental illness for the past five hundred years-from the viewpoint of the patients themselves.Dale Peterson has compiled twenty-seven selections dating from 1436 through 1976. He prefaces each excerpt with biographical information about the writer. Peterson's running commentary explains the national differences in mental health care and the historical changes that have take place in symptoms and treatment. He traces the development of the private madhouse system in England and the state-run asylum system in the United States. Included is the first comprehensive bibliography of writings by the mentally ill.

Download or read book Hall of Mirrors written by Laura A. Lewis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting. Laura A. Lewis describes how the meanings attached to the categories of Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo were generated within that setting, as she shows how the cultural politics of caste produced a system of fluid and relational designations that simultaneously facilitated and undermined Spanish governance. Using judicial records from a variety of colonial courts, Lewis highlights the ethnographic details of legal proceedings as she demonstrates how Indians, in particular, came to be the masters of witchcraft, a domain of power that drew on gendered and hegemonic caste distinctions to complicate the colonial hierarchy. She also reveals the ways in which blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos mediated between Spaniards and Indians, alternatively reinforcing Spanish authority and challenging it through alliances with Indians. Bringing to life colonial subjects as they testified about their experiences, Hall of Mirrors discloses a series of contradictions that complicate easy distinctions between subalterns and elites, resistance and power.

Download or read book Madhouses Mad Doctors and Madmen written by Andrew Scull and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1981-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.

Download or read book Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century written by A. Ingram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

Download or read book Sex and Seclusion Class and Custody written by Jonathan Andrews and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume had its origin in a stimulating seminar series devoted to historical perspectives on gender and class in the history of psychiatry. The papers presented outlined a number of important perspectives on the place of gender and class within the history of psychiatry and, more broadly, medicine and society. There were also considerable inter-relationships between the various thematic strands developed in the papers - so much so, that organisers, speakers and participants alike were keen to see a published outcome.

Download or read book Voices of Madness written by Allan Ingram and published by Alan Sutton Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Madness of King George offered a fictional portrayal of madness in 18th century Britain. This book portrays the reality. These writings afford a greater understanding of attitudes towards and the treatment of madness during this period.