Religious deviance and psychological medicine in Elizabeth Stone's writing

Abstract: This talk explores four autobiographical books by Elizabeth T. Stone (b. 1811), an alleged madwoman whose family members had her confined to an asylum for her religious beliefs and behaviours. Stone's narratives offer insight into how families and communities negotiated cases of religious deviance. Her theological framing of her identity and experience challenges the medical categories of her time, while also raising questions about the nature of psychiatric power and the limits of civil liberty in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

• Mark W. Lee (DPhil, University of Oxford) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Crandall University, Canada, and a research associate at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. His primary scholarly interests include history of medicine and history of religion.
• Edward A. David (DPhil, University of Oxford) is Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford, UK. He is the author, most recently, of A Christian Approach to Corporate Religious Liberty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), among other publications. His articles have appeared in Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and Studies in Christian Ethics. David’s primary scholarly interests include law and religion, theological ethics, and virtue theory.

This event will take place via Zoom at 5.30PM BST (UK time) on Tuesday 31 May 2022.

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