Julia Heinemann

Research Julia Heinemann

Research team

Expertise

I am a historian of the early modern period. I have specialized in political and social history: My first book combines New Kinship Studies and political history to understand monarchical rulership. My current project focuses on the making of invalids in the Habsburg monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I explore how the figure of the “invalid” was made and negotiated by different political actors and institutions and I situate the phenomenon in the conceptual transformations of work, the body, war and the state. I thus have expertise in the history of the body and gender, in kinship studies, and in the history of dis/ability, poverty and military labour.

Infirmity and Healing in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century German Life Writings. A New Perspective on Early Modern Corporeality. 01/11/2026 - 31/10/2030

Abstract

Contemporary debates challenge the static, binary and partly medical understanding of health defined by the WHO. As early modern bodies were seen as fluid, porous and linked to one's character, this project argues that a historical perspective on corporeality can offer valuable insights. While scholarship has examined medical knowledge, body models and healing practices, the historical concept of healing itself and its relation to different forms of infirmity remains unexplored. Based on a curated corpus of ca. ninety ego-documents from German-speaking Europe, the project addresses this gap with a historical anthropological approach. It scrutinizes how infirmity and healing were conceptualized and related, how gender, social status, age and denomination shaped these concepts and narratives, and how they shifted alongside changing models of the body and medical knowledge between 1650 and 1800. A database will map social profiles of the authors, healing practices (medical/magical/religious), and vocabulary of infirm conditions and approaches to deal with them, enabling intersectional and longue durée comparison. By focusing on healing rather than health, the project highlights the changeability of bodies and broadens healing to include aspects such as adaptation, relief and acceptance. It reconstructs historical transformations of corporeality and contributes to contemporary debates by revealing infirmity, healing and the body as culturally negotiated processes.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Funding

  • FWO

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Historicizing healing. An actor-centered approach to the intersections of dis/ability, gender, religion and medicine in the Early Modern Period. 01/04/2025 - 31/03/2029

Abstract

Healing is a vague concept. Modern medicine lacks a clear definition or a consensus on healing which can encompass diverse phenomena such as physical functionality or the absence of pain. But healing was even more elusive in the early modern period. Categorial differentiations between curable and incurable diseases or between lifelong disabilities and short-term sicknesses were common. More so, concepts and practices of healing touched and connected fields that we today understand as separate, such as medicine (academic and empiric), magic and religion. In the end, it was God who could grant a cure or prevent it. So how can we grasp healing in a world where there is neither a unified approach to it nor a coherent understanding? This project investigates early modern concepts and practices of healing by asking what healing was for people with disabilities in the early modern period. The project thus wants to reclaim healing from the perspective of disability history whilst avoiding the problematic assumption that disability needs healing. The analysis is focused on intersections of dis/ability, gender, social status, religion and medicine.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Funding

  • BOF

Project type(s)

  • Research Project

Rules of support in eighteenth-century Europe. 01/02/2024 - 31/01/2029

Abstract

This is the main research focus during my tenure period: I plan to investigate how societies make decisions about who they support, how people are classified and how people in need react, and how and when criteria become self-evident. I will focus on three cases: military welfare, poor relief, and access to citizenship. The research focus thus brings together the fields of disability history, poverty research and the history of migration to approach the phenomenon from a broader perspective. I intend to develop new perspectives on early modern concepts and practices of un/worthiness, utility and belonging that shaped notions of the state and its subjects.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Funding

  • BOF
  • BOF

Project type(s)

  • Research Project