Dreaming, old age, and melancholia

Join three researchers to hear about current research on dreaming, old age, and melancholia in the Early Modern era. There will be an opportunity to ask questions in a chaired panel at the end of the session. Niall Boyce will discuss how people understood the gap between sleeping and waking. His research uses private notebooks, pamphlets, and stage plays to explore how people understood what happens to a person when waking consciousness ends and dreaming begins. Amie Bolissian will discuss how medicine approached ageing health in early modern England, beliefs about older bodies, and how searches for evidence of this in the Wellcome collection revealed that ’old’ did not always means ’old’ in the sources! Emily Betz will reflect on how cultural context shapes the way we view illness by looking at the multiplicity of identities associated with melancholy in eighteenth-century England. The panel will be facilitated by Dr Elaine Leong who works on early modern hist