VISITING SPEAKER:
  Friends of the Library Speaker
  - Passions for Learning 
		
Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:30 - Reid Library ground floor meeting room (Enter via glass sliding staff door - ground floor - facing car park)
		
Prof Yasmin Haskell, Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism, UWA
Passions for Learning and of the Unreasonably Learned in the Eighteenth
Century

The Dutch physician and Latin poet, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens
(1728-1801), published in Groningen in 1790 an expanded edition of his
Latin didactic poem on ‘the health of men  of letters’ (‘De
valetudine literatorum’), which he originally composed as a medical
student  in Paris some forty years earlier and published in 1749.
Heerkens’ work belongs to a long tradition of humanist theorising and
worrying about the occupational safety of the learned.  In the years
between the first and second editions, Samuel Auguste André David
Tissot (1728–1797), Lausanne physician, professor, and public health
advocate (best known to posterity for his writings on migraine and
masturbation) had also published a Latin academic oration on ‘the
health of men of letters’.  Heerkens does not neglect to assert the
priority of his own ‘De valetudine literatorum’.  It must have been
galling for Heerkens to see that Tissot’s oration stigmatised as
pathological precisely the sort of life of learning -- and life-long
learning! -- in which Heerkens himself was engaged. In my lecture I
shall review his Heerkens’ rather testy engagement with Tissot, his
defence of the passion for learning, and advice to the learned on
moderating their passions. Were scholars and scientists inherently
unreasonable?

About the Speaker

Yasmin Haskell is Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the
University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the ARC
Centre for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. She has published on neo-
Latin literature, the early modern Society of Jesus, and the history of
psychiatry.  In the Centre for the History of Emotions she is co-
ordinating projects on ‘Jesuit Emotions’ and ‘Passions for
Learning’. Her most recent (edited) book, 'Diseases of the Imagination
and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period’, is published by
Brepols.

Free parking is available via Entrance 1, Car Park No. 3

If glass door is unmanned, please enter via spiral staircase to 1st
floor, then go downstairs to the ground floor meeting room.

Members:  Free, Non Members $5 donation
		
For more information:
  David Thatcher
  david.thatcher@uwa.edu.au
  6488 2326

Starts       : Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:30
Ends         : Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:30
		
Last Updated : Wed, 04 Jul 2012 08:12