Rebecca Noble will be presenting part of the second Chapter of her PhD thesis. She will be discussing madness and selfhood in Bourbon Mexico. Please find her abstract below.

Staff and students are warmly invited, so if you wish to attend please RSVP to Sheilagh Holmes. Refreshments and a light lunch will be provided!

Best wishes,

Jane Hand and Roberta Bivins

Madness and selfhood: creating ‘docile vassals’ in Bourbon Mexico

Madness in eighteenth-century Mexico was understood as a religious and medical problem. There are many references to madness in the historical record and I argue that it was an important term in understanding individual behaviour and as a metaphor for managing society more broadly. This piece analyses the use of madness in texts printed and circulated in Mexico. I draw on medical publications, hagiographies, poetry, and politico-moral tracts in order to explore shifting understandings of madness and its use in a range of discourses during this period of intellectual change.

I engage with scholarship on the history of madness, medical and scientific discourses and selfhood in order to discuss medical perspectives on madness in Bourbon Mexico, the relationship between existing religious and medical ideas of madness and changing scientific theories, and the importance of reformulated ideas of madness for understanding individuals and society. The texts outlined are used to ask the following questions: what worldviews shaped beliefs about madness? How did new understandings of the body, mind and soul alter how madness was understood and treated? What do eighteenth-century understandings of madness tell us about the construction of the self in Mexico? In particular, these texts enable a discussion of the medicalisation of moral aspects of madness which were traditionally subject to religious authority.

This work is part of the second chapter of my PhD, which is the first substantive chapter based on primary research. The chapter provides a framework for the following chapters where I use instances of madness in bureaucratic records to explore what it was to be human in Bourbon Mexico.