This collection consists of a two-volume edition of primary source materials that document the asylum in the long nineteenth century. The focus of the collection will be on rare and difficult-to-access published and archival materials, arranged by topic criteria. Each volume will be a sort of 'compendium' of rarer sources. There is an introduction to the whole set and word introductions to each volume together with headnotes to each document or section of documents contextualizing the sources and pointing out anything particularly noteworthy.
The sources feature all kinds of publications and archives including documents, laws, newspapers, medical texts, journals and books, etc. that can be considered nineteenth century primary/archival sources difficult to access. This two-volume edition has a very close connection with the history of medicine, the history of sexuality and the history of insanity in the long nineteenth century as well as with the history of institutions to contain and control the mentally insane and the sexually ‘deviant’.
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz is a Lecturer in Social History and Cultural Studies at the University of Málaga, Spain. She has specialised in the social and cultural history of deviant women and children in Victorian England, and her research interests have since expanded to contemporary gender and sexual identity issues in Neo-Victorian fiction.
Steven King is a modern British historian with primary research interests in the period from 1750 to the present. He is best known as an historian of welfare, writing on topics such as regional welfare regimes, the agency of poor people and welfare claimants, advocacy for the poor, and the particular experiences of the sick and disabled under the British welfare system from 1601.Professor King joined Nottingham Trent University in 2020. He has previously held posts at the University of Leicester, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Central Lancashire and the Institute of Historical Research.
Steven Taylor, University College Dublin, is a historian of health, medicine, and welfare with a focus on drinking culture and substance use amongst the Irish communities of London and New York. He has previously taught at the University of Kent (Lecturer in the History of Medicine) and University of Leicester (Teaching Fellow) where his modules have focused on medicine, health, disability, and welfare from the eighteenth century.
