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Masterclass – Professor Yasmin Haskell

Masterclass honouring the 39th Erasmus Birthday Lecture

Yasmin Haskell: Passions for and of Learning in the Early Modern Period

Date: 9 November 2018
Time: 12:00 – 14:15 (welcome from 11:30)
Venue: Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam
ECTS: 1 (participating in masterclass & public lecture + small assignment)
Open to: PhD candidates & RMa students
Further information
Registration

How were the emotions (/passions) harnessed in education and science in the early modern period and which emotions or temperaments were especially associated with scholars and scientists?

How did the emotional experience of the schoolchild/ scholar/scientist differ from that of earlier times, and how were the emotions perceived in different places and contexts to affect, hinder, or further learning or intellectual work?

Participants in this masterclass are invited to explore the emotions in the early modern classroom, academy, and Republic of Letters. From the genial melancholy of Marsilio Ficino to the melancholy hypochondria of the late Renaissance, from the vices of the learned lamented in the German-speaking lands to the occupational hazards of learning deplored by physician Samuel Tissot in his inaugural professorial address at the University of Lausanne, on the ‘Health of Scholars’. Topics might include curiosity, bibliomania, zeal for travel, ambition, pride, anger, excessive admiration for authorities… and sloth!

Register

Fifteen promising young students at graduate level (MA students and PhD candidates) will be selected to participate in this Masterclass. If you are interested, please apply before 20 October via this online form of the KNAW. We will inform you whether your application has been successful before 1 November 2018. The public lecture by Yasmin Haskell will take place later in the afternoon.

Yasmin Haskell

Yasmin Haskell, FAHA, is Chair of Latin and Director of the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol, UK. From 2003-2016 she was Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia, Perth. She is a Partner Investigator (formerly Foundation Chief Investigator) in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: 1100-1800.

Haskell has published monographs, articles, and edited volumes on neo-Latin poetry, the reception of classical authors, the Latin culture of the early modern Society of Jesus, Latin in the Enlightenment, and the history of psychiatry and emotions, including Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2003), Prescribing Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), (with Juanita Ruys), Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period (Tempe, AZ and Turnhout: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Brepols, 2010), and (with Raphaële Garrod), Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions Between Europe, Asia and the Americas (forthcoming Leiden: Brill, 2018).

Preliminary bibliography

  • S. Kivistö, The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities, Leiden 2014.
  • P. Hummel, Moeurs érudites: Etude sur la micrologie litteraire (Allemagne, XVIe-XVIIIe siecles), Geneva 2002.
  • Y. Haskell, ‘Physician heal thyself!’ Emotions and the Health of the Learned in Samuel Auguste André Tissot (1728-1797) and Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726-1801)’, in Henry Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment (Springer, 2013), pp. 105-24.

Assignment for 1 ECTS

Will be announced soon.