Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Demons, Humors, and Medieval Minds,” with Leigh Ann Craig, associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages.
Popular media treat the European Middle Ages as a backward era wherein any person with a mental illness was understood to be tainted by the influence of sin, the devil, or of witchcraft, and was subjected to abuse, neglect, or even judicial punishment.
In truth, although medieval thinkers did acknowledge the existence of demons, they also had sophisticated medical models that explained mental illness. The historical reality of how medieval people thought about, categorized, and lived with the mental illnesses in their midst is far more complex and interesting than we find in fictional portrayals of the period as universally cruel or unreasonably superstitious.
Join Professor Leigh Ann Craig, an award-winning instructor and scholar of medieval Europe and its treatment of disability, for a fascinating look at how medieval people decided whether a given individual was suffering demonic possession or a humoral imbalance such as melancholy, mania, or frenzy.
She’ll discuss how medieval people defined, diagnosed, and lived with mental illnesses, and the sorts of categories they developed to classify and describe such experiences. She'll talk about how people then determined who might be suffering from demonic assaults or possessions, as opposed to organically-arising conditions, and how they managed and treated the mental illness they identified.
How fundamentally different were their approaches from our own? Dr. Craig will explore the development of ideas about mental illness in medieval medicine and theology—and the entanglement between thoughts based on religion versus science. She’ll also present examples of how such ideas were applied by communities experiencing disability in their midst those ideas.
Her talk will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered about the ways in which premodern cultures thought about the mind and its troubles, as well as anyone who has grappled with the way we think about mental illness today. (Advance tickets: $12. Doors: $15, or $13 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)
Image: Demonic possession as depicted in an early 14th century edition of Miroir Histoire (Speculum Historiale), an encyclopedia first published by Vincent of Beauvais. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)