The Source of Fear, Genius and Madness: Melancholy and Mental Health in Renaissance Italy

Please join Library Special Collections for a lecture from 2024 Rootenberg scholar Jessica Hogbin.

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Renaissance scholars used and abused melancholy, a now-defunct category from humoral theory, to explain the human mind and the natural world. Through the study of early print materials on melancholy and the mind held at UCLA Library Special Collections, this talk engages with early modern conceptions around mental function, considering how fear, genius and madness could share the same origin.

Italian philosophers and physicians used print to debate and disseminate theories about melancholy, a term which could refer to a bodily humor associated with sloth, a potentially deadly disease, and a desirable mental state correlated with intelligence. However, it was the term’s ambiguity that also allowed for its ubiquity and utility in understanding the relationship between bodily and mental function, developing beliefs which continue to impact our understanding of mental health to this day.

Jessica Hogbin is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Syracuse University, where she studies the relationship between medicine, narratives around health and politics in early modern Italy. Her dissertation, Innumerable Melancholies: Medicine, Mental Health and Human Nature in Renaissance Italy, 1450-1650, considers melancholy as a means of comprehending Renaissance thought around mental and physical well-being, along with conceptions of human nature, the wider natural world and scientific thought. Research for this dissertation has taken Jessica to archives and libraries across Italy, including in Rome, Florence, and Venice, England, and the United States, most recently UCLA Library Special Collections.

The Rootenberg fellowship promotes the use of materials in History & Special Collections for the Sciences in UCLA Library Special Collections. The award is named for Barbara Rootenberg, an alumna of the UCLA School of Library Science and an internationally-renowned antiquarian bookseller.