Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness: The Eberbach Asylum and German Society, 1815-1849

by Ann Goldberg

Overview

Drawing upon a rich set of asylum patient case records, this book reconstructs the encounter of state officials and medical practitioners with peasant madness and deviancy at a transitional period in German and psychiatry history. Focusing on religious madness, nymphomania, masturbatory insanity, and Jewishness, this study probes the daily encounters in which psychiatric categories were applied, experienced, and resisted in the settings of family, village, and insane asylum. Goldberg's careful examination sheds light on a range of issues concerning gender, sexuality, religious politics, class relations, state-building, and anti-Semitism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195125818
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	12/28/1998
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	1610L (what's this?)

About the Author

Ann Goldberg is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Duchy of Nassau and the Eberbach Asylum
Section I: Religion
2. Religious Madness in the Vormarz: Culture, Politics, and the Professionalization of Psychiatry
3. Religious Madness and the Formation of Patients
Section II: Sexuality and Gender
4. Medical Representation of Sexual Madness: Nymphomania and Masturbatory Insanity
5. Doctors and Patients: The Practice(s) of Nymphomania
6. Women, Sex, and Rural Life
Section III: Delinquincy and Criminality
7. Masturbatory Insanity and Delinquincy
8. Jews and the Criminalization of Madness
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Sperber

Goldberg's remarkable study of mental illness in early 19th-century Germany places the phenomenon of insanity squarely within the context of late absolutist regime and a crisis-ridden, impoverished social and economic order. Her account of the gendered structuring of madness, its bureaucratic politics, admits connections to religious enthusiams and religious prejudice offers anunexpected but extraordinarily illuminating insight into state and society in Germany before the revolution of 1848.
— University of Missouri

Doris Kaufmann

Ann Goldberg's new book opens a challenging new dimension of 19th-century German social history. We've had histories of asylums and medicalization in other national fields for some years, likewise a profusion of works on the formation of Germany's bourgeois culture. There is even the kernel of a literature on early 19th-century German rural society. Now Goldberg has beautifully brought together these concerns. This fascinating exploration of sexualities, religion, and the modern pedagogies of order takes us to the frontier of bourgeois culture and rural society, where ordinary people learned how to be ill. This is a 'micro' history that compels the 'macro' to listen.'- Geoff Eley, University of Michigan 'Goldberg's enterprise is an original and long-missed contribution to the social and cultural history of madness in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her work provides at the same time valuable insights into the broader field of the history of peasant culture and social experience, especially in the rural world of Nassau. The strength of Goldberg's work is an outstanding and sensitive interpretation of the individual's experience of madness as a language of distress and dissent in rural lower-class culture that was shaped by gender and ethnicity.
—

Editorial Reviews

"Goldberg is...never satisfied with simple monocausal explanations, but moves sensitively and surefootedly through dense matrices of cultural factors, social pressures, political endeavors, and medical theorizing."—Central European History

"This is a taut, concise and well-written analysis. It is also a richly nuanced and multilayered study, at once theoretically sophisticate and concretely historical."— Journal of Modern History

"Goldberg's remarkable study of mental illness in early nineteenth-century Germany places the phenomenon of insanity squarely within the context of a late absolutist regime and a crisis-ridden, impoverished social and economic order. Her account of the gendered structuring of madness, its bureaucratic politics, and its connections to religious enthusiasm and religious prejudice offers an unexpected but extraordinarily illuminating insight into state and society in Germany before the revolution of 1848."—Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri

"Goldberg's enterprise is an original and long-missed contribution to the social and cultural history of madness in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her work provides at the same time valuable insights into the broader field of the history of peasant culture and social experience, especially in the rural world of Nassau. The strength of Goldberg's work is an outstanding and sensitive interpretation of the individual's experience of madness as a language of distress and dissent in rural lower-class culture that was shaped by gender and ethnicity."—Doris Kaufmann, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

"Ann Goldberg's new book opens a challenging new dimension of nineteenth-century German social history. We've had histories of asylums and medicalization in other national fields for some years, likewise a profusion of works on the formation of Germany's bourgeois culture. There is even the kernel of a literature on early nineteenth-century German rural society. Now Goldberg has beautifully brought together these concerns. This fascinating exploration of sexualities, religion, and the modern pedagogies of order takes us to the frontier of bourgeois culture and rural society, where ordinary people learned how to be ill. This is a 'micro' history that compels the 'macro' to listen."—Geoff Eley, The University of Michigan

"In giving a prominent voice to patient and village life, she [Goldberg] reveals not only the medical but the social construction of 'madness,' made vivid through her detailed rendering of the immense strains of impoverished rural life for Germans of the early nineteenth century."—Susan Lanzoni, Journal of Asian History

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