Research team
Expertise
I am a historian of the early modern period. I have specialized in political and social history: My first book combines New Kinship Studies and political history to understand monarchical rulership. My current project focuses on the making of invalids in the Habsburg monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I explore how the figure of the “invalid” was made and negotiated by different political actors and institutions and I situate the phenomenon in the conceptual transformations of work, the body, war and the state. I thus have expertise in the history of the body and gender, in kinship studies, and in the history of dis/ability, poverty and military labour.
Historicizing healing. An actor-centered approach to the intersections of dis/ability, gender, religion and medicine in the Early Modern Period.
Abstract
Healing is a vague concept. Modern medicine lacks a clear definition or a consensus on healing which can encompass diverse phenomena such as physical functionality or the absence of pain. But healing was even more elusive in the early modern period. Categorial differentiations between curable and incurable diseases or between lifelong disabilities and short-term sicknesses were common. More so, concepts and practices of healing touched and connected fields that we today understand as separate, such as medicine (academic and empiric), magic and religion. In the end, it was God who could grant a cure or prevent it. So how can we grasp healing in a world where there is neither a unified approach to it nor a coherent understanding? Despite the existence of a wide range of historical studies on patients' options, medical pluralism, or the role of sickness and disability with regard to pain and the ability to work, neither medical history nor disability history has thus far questioned the concept of healing itself. This is where the project comes in: It investigates early modern concepts and practices of healing by asking what healing was for people with disabilities in the early modern period. The aim is to radically historize healing and dis/ability by significantly broadening the analytical framework from a focus on patients towards an actor-centered approach which analyzes healing as a part of early modern life stories. The project thus wants to reclaim healing from the perspective of disability history whilst avoiding the problematic assumption that disability needs healing. In so doing, it innovatively combines the two usually unconnected research fields medical history and disability history, while also integrating body history and the history of religion. Methodologically, this is achieved through an approach that is inspired by symmetrical anthropology and by the cultural model of disability in order to take historical alterity seriously. The project does therefore not presuppose a modern concept of disability or healing and instead works with an actor-centered approach. The analysis is focused on intersections of dis/ability, gender, social status, religion and medicine. A close reading of a representative selection of seventeenth-century ego-documents from Flanders and Germany German that compares writings from authors of different gender, social status and confession allows for this approach.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Heinemann Julia
- Fellow: Gollacz Isabella
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Rules of support in eighteenth-century Europe.
Abstract
This is the main research focus during my tenure period: I plan to investigate how societies make decisions about who they support, how people are classified and how people in need react, and how and when criteria become self-evident. I will focus on three cases: military welfare, poor relief, and access to citizenship. The research focus thus brings together the fields of disability history, poverty research and the history of migration to approach the phenomenon from a broader perspective. I intend to develop new perspectives on early modern concepts and practices of un/worthiness, utility and belonging that shaped notions of the state and its subjects.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Heinemann Julia
- Fellow: Heinemann Julia
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project