Mark Lee – “Spirituality and Lunacy in Victorian Britain”

Today, 24 April, School of Political Science & Department of Psychology have lecture from visiting scholar Mark Lee from Oxford University, UK on topic Spirituality and Lunacy in Victorian Britain.

Are spiritual experiences in any sense authentic? Or are they simply a form of delusion? This lecture looks at how people answered such questions in Victorian Britain. It explores movements such as evangelical revivalism, Irvingism, and Spiritualism, each of which was associated with ‘abnormal’ spiritual experiences, including trances, convulsions, visions, tongues-speaking, prophecy, automatic writing, and communication with the dead. The lecture looks, firstly, at the ways in which these phenomena posed a threat to modern notions of identity and rationality. And secondly, it traces developments in how abnormal spirituality was interpreted and policed by pastors, physicians and insane asylum superintendents over the course of the nineteenth century.

Mark Lee is completing his DPhil in History at the University of Oxford. His thesis explores the experience and interpretation of religious forms of madness and melancholy in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He is part of Prof. Barbara Taylor’s research network for the Welcome Trust-funded project, “Pathologies of Solitude, 18th–21st Century,” and has worked closely with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (Wolfson College) to develop links between scholars of various disciplines whose research touches on the experience of mental illness, both past and present. Before going to Oxford, he completed an MA in Theological Studies with a concentration in the History of Christianity at Regent College
(Vancouver, Canada).