CFP: Making Madnesses in Early Modern England (RSA Boston, March 20-22, 2025)

In John Ford’s raucous tragicomedy, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), the proto-psychiatrist Corax attempts an experimental treatment on his forlorn melancholic patients: he stages a masque – acted by the allegorical figures of psychic ailments, including Dotage, Phrenitis, Hypochondria, St. Vitus’ Dance, Hydrophobia (rabies), and Lycanthropia (the delusion that you’ve transformed into a wolf) – in order to shake his afflicted clients out of their melancholic funk. Pulling from Robert Burton’s massive tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ford’s play showcases the sheer variety of madnesses – even within a subgenre such as “melancholy” – that were active, endemic, and of great dramatic interest in early modern England. These madnesses, as trailblazing scholarship by Carol Thomas Neely, Bridget Escolme, and Duncan Salkeld has shown, were also imbedded within a network of other rhetorical structures – from the medical to the astrological; from political fears of sedition to witchcraft legislation; and from early modern theatre to modern dramatic reimaginings of mental health from that era.

Playwrights from the period were obsessed with mental illness – and not just Shakespeare with his well-known depictions of madness in Macbeth, King Lear, and The Comedy of Errors, among other dramas. The singing madmen in The Duchess of Malfi beg to “howl some heavy note” for the play’s harassed and tortured heroine; the rabidly jealous doctor Alibius in The Changeling rents out his medically incarcerated patients as wedding entertainment. London’s Bethlem Hospital (also known as “Bedlam”) – though intended as a charity – was often described as a space where squalor, neglect, and abuse ran rampant. In addition to Bethlem, physicians such as Richard Napier wrote extensive medical records, which we could access, of the mentally ill people he treated in Buckinghamshire. Given all of the above, this panel seeks papers that explore any way madness was portrayed in early modern England.

A list of potential questions and topics that is in no way exhaustive:

*Showing how madness intersects with other realms of subjecthood: race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.

*Links between madness and the arts: music, theater, poetry, rhetoric, or painting.

*Reading madness through a Disability Studies lens. Is madness always a disability? Can it be an advantage?

*Connections between madness and the supernatural or preternatural: witchcraft, demonic possession, werewolves, or lunar disturbance.

*What is the relationship between madness and discourses of love/pleasure?

*Reading madness through histories of medicine, disease, emotion/affect, or dreams/visions.

*Representations of early modern doctors and “psychiatric” hospitals.

*Why do some characters fake madness in these plays? What’s the difference between real and spurious madness?

*Analyzing how early modern madness is depicted either in modern stage productions or via other media (films, paintings, graphic novels, websites, etc.).

*How can we foster a mad or mental illness positive pedagogy? Can early modernists blend historical discussions of madness, with activism and advocacy for those with mental illness?

Please submit the following materials to Avi Mendelson, at amendel@brandeis.edu, by August 12th to be considered for this panel: Your field of study; your paper title (15 words maximum); an abstract (200 words maximum); a one page abbreviated CV (.pdf or .doc upload); PhD completion date (past or expected); full name / current academic affiliation / email address. Please note that the RSA is very strict about word count, and will not accept entries that go beyond the maximum word limit.