Science

Abstract

Chapter 4, ‘Science’, examines the medicalization of ecstatic phenomena by Italian positivist science. It shows how ecstasy, a privileged topic of study in the ascending field of psychology, was mostly considered to be a manifestation of mental and bodily disorder which ought to be kept under the watchful eye of Italian doctors and the government of the newly unified country. After highlighting the fundamental role played by Jean-Martin Charcot’s ‘rediscovery’ of hysteria in the 1870s in the positivist scientific assessment of ecstatic phenomena, the chapter turns to the works of Italian scientists Andrea Verga, Antonio Tarchini Bonfanti, Enrico Morselli, Paolo Mantegazza, Giulio Belfiore, Gaetano Rummo, Alfonso Asturaro, Giuseppe Scipione Vinaj, Cesare Lombroso, and Salvatore Ottolenghi, who exerted their clinical gaze upon ecstatic phenomena, resorting to hysteria and hypnotism and linking them to the unconscious mechanisms of the mind. The chapter also includes a section that accounts for the debate that juxtaposed different interpretations of the ecstatic phenomenon in the years under review and included positions that advocated a middle ground between the extremes of the scientific and religious standpoints, positions voiced by Filippo Linati and Baldassarre Labanca. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two cases of ecstatic dis-order: the collective ecstasies of the possessed women of Verzegnis, victims of an epidemic of hystero-demonopathy as reported by Dr Fernando Franzolini, and the ecstasies of Lucia Carnesi in the context of ‘Il dramma di Mezzojuso’, recounted by Scipio Sighele.