Managing furious insanity: Hospital cell confinement and its alternatives in eighteenth-century Denmark

Presentation by Benjamin Brandt Christiansen (postdoc, the Saxo Institute).

Despite the vivid imagery that the “history of madness” and “early modern confinement” evoke, surprisingly little archive-based historical research has been done. Combining church history and social history, this presentation focuses on the management of cases concerning severely mentally disordered persons in eighteenth-century Denmark using a previously unused source base, the archives of Danish dioceses. In particular, what institutional, legal and pastoral frameworks could authorities draw on before the age of the asylum, and how did they apply these in practice through confinement and other means?

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