Mad, Dangerous Love
Where: Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont St.
718-222-4111 Price: Free
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Every Free Friday from 5pm to 9pm, enjoy browsing all of our exhibitions and our landmarked library, and sip on a Brooklyn Brewery beer while listening to live music!
Love hurts. Lovesick. Love can drive you mad. Everyone knows that love ain’t easy; that in fact, it can be quite messy. We begin Valentine’s Weekend 2017 with a look at the more complicated side of love, from vengeful poisons to demonic lovesick raving, plus a special tasting of the deepest, darkest chocolate brownies from Baked!
The evening’s schedule:
5:00pm-7:00pm | Tommy Stathes curates cartoon shorts of love lost and avenged |
5:00pm-9:00pm | Arts & crafts! Design your own cupid’s arrow. |
5:45pm-9:00pm | Special library collection items on display featuring lurid true-crime drama and forbidden love! |
7:00pm-7:30pm | Hysterically in Love: The Battle Between Medicine and Religion in a 19th Century Parisian Hysteria Ward, a talk by Asti Hustvedt |
8:00pm-9:00pm | Romance and Revenge: a talk by the Masters of Social Gastronomy |
Lecture Topics
7pm: Hysterically in Love: The Battle Between Medicine and Religion in a 19th Century Parisian Hysteria Ward
Scholar Asti Hustvedt reveals the dramatic tale of Geneviève Basile Legrand, one of the medical celebrities in Dr. Charcot’s hysteria ward in Paris during the late-19th century. Geneviève suffered from diabolical fits and ecstatic trances, convinced that her dead fiancé haunted her as a demon lover. This woman’s torment represented a battleground between a burgeoning mental health profession and the Catholic Church, both vying for the control of women’s bodies. Charcot, through his theories and diagnoses, transformed his hysteric Geneviève into something of a saint and something of a witch.
8pm: Romance and Revenge: A History of Aphrodisiacs and Poisons
Sarah and Soma, a.k.a. the Masters of Social Gastronomy, take on curious food topics and break down the history, science, and stories behind them. Every culture has a long history of aphrodisiacs – love-inducing and libido-promoting foods, ranging from the commonplace to the esoteric. Is chocolate the rightful king of Valentine’s Day, or could we do better with a tiger’s unmentionables? Let’s trace the history of these foxy foods and see what science has to say about their amorous assertions.
First comes loves, then comes marriage, then comes a little bit of rat poison in their coffee cup. When love goes wrong, out comes the Victorian obsession with female poisoners: delicate and seductive, these ladies made headlines in the age of yellow journalism for offing their lovers with poisoned food. Come hear their stories and…hey, does this taste like almonds to you?
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