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