Dans le cadre de son thème annuel « Le bien-être au XVIIIe siècle », la Société Finlandaise d’Étude du Dix-huitième Siècle organise le 25 novembre 2025, de 16h30 à 18h30, un webinaire intitulé « Well-being, healing and happiness in the eighteenth century ».
« As part of its thematic focus in 2025 on notions of well-being in the eighteenth century,
the Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is organising a webinar on well-being,
healing and happiness in the eighteenth century on November 25, 2025. The programme
includes three short lectures and a concluding discussion. The webinar is open for
members of the society and non-members alike.
Health, in all its humanity, is an integral part of eighteenth-century society and culture.
Alongside anatomical and purely medical discourse, health reflects deeper aspects of
human experience that are, inter alia, touched upon in the poetics of literary production,
rhetoric, and even the intellectual and political debates of the eighteenth century more
broadly. In other words, health represents a cultural practice in which the body and the self
play a significant role in experiencing illness, healing, and convalescence and in
communicating that embodied experience to others as well.
The webinar highlights how recovery was reflected in literary works – in their
representation, production, and publication; how the language of illness, healing, and
recovery was reflected in religious practices and beliefs about God’s support in political
conflicts between religious factions, without forgetting the significance of “pathologising”
rhetoric in broader philosophical debates. Since well-being includes the concept of
happiness, the webinar will also highlight female intellectuals’ ideas about happiness and
the meaning of a good life in early modern Scandinavia. The perspective of literary and
intellectual production as a mouthpiece for the values of the Enlightenment is remarkable in this regard.
The webinar provides fertile ground for examining concepts of health and well-being as a
heterogeneous research topic, not to mention the diversity of representations of human
experience and the sensibilities of their channelling in the eighteenth century ».
Programme :
16:30 PhD Bénédicte Prot (University of Basel, Switzerland)
“Writing (during) Convalescence”
17:00 PhD, Professor Anne C. Vila (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
“Prodigious Healing and Threats to the Body / Body Politic in Eighteenth-
Century France, from the Jansenist convulsionnaires to Animal Magnetism”
17:30 PhD Matilda Amundsen Bergström (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
“Looking for Happiness in Early Modern Scandinavia”
18:00 Discussion
Ce webinaire est ouvert aux membres de la Société Finlandaise ainsi qu’à toute autre personne intéressée par le sujet.