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Melancolia în Europa medievală (1100-1400). Depresie, creativitate și filosofie a naturii

Melancholy in Medieval Europe (1100-1400). Depression, Creativity, and Philosophy of Nature

Project code: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-1080

Melancholy holds a particular popularity as a topic among modern research. Despite this general interest, little has been written about melancholy in the Middle Ages, especially in comparison to the research attention it gets in Antiquity, Renaissance, early modern times, 18th-century German Romantics and so forth. Whatever was the cultural or historical reason for this omission, it is certainly not due to the lack of material. The present project addresses melancholy from a interdisciplinary perspective of history of philosophy, medicine, religion, arts. Thus, the project aims at filling up this major gap in the cultural history, and render it comprehensible to the modern reader.

The project aims at scholarly results (monograph with a renowned international publisher; peer-reviewed articles workshops and summer school) as well as at a broader public. Melancholy raises some of the most relevant philosophical issues, like the body-mind problem, social bias in philosophy, cultural prejudices and how to reflect on them.The project studies melancholy in the period 1100-1400 in Europe from the perspective of several intertwined disciplines as: Medicine and Psychology, Natural Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Religion and Theology and Visualization in Arts.

By exploring each domain in an interdisciplinary manner, the project will analyze the philosophical implications arising from the problems that melancholy poses to the medieval scholars:

1. The problem of corporeal complexion and the role melancholy plays in the individual knowledge and individual responsibility, comprised under the body-soul relation;
2. Men and women and the problem of cultural prejudices;
3. The predisposition that melancholy offers for practices related to prophecy, divination and witchcraft;
4. Melancholy perceived as madness and illness of the body;
5. The melancholic solitude in contrast with the medieval definition of the human being as a social animal;
6. The problem of melancholy perceived as a sin under the concepts of tristitia and acedia.

In doing so the project will study several medieval authors of which we can mention: Hildegard of Bingen, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Pietro d’Abano, Jean Buridan and Évrart de Conty. By identifying and studying the relevant philosophical texts, the project aims at filling up a major gap in the cultural history, and render it comprehensible to the modern reader in an interdisciplinary approach. In this endeavor, the project wants to offer a clear understanding of melancholy in the Middles Ages that ultimately will try to enrich the contemporary concepts of melancholy and depression by highlighting their differences, similarities and sources.