Katherine Fennelly. 2019. An archaeology of lunacy: managing madness in early nineteenth-century asylum.

In this book Katherine Fennelly provides one of the first glimpses into the world of early lunatic asylums in Ireland and England. Archaeologists have only in recent decades turned their attention to the lunatic asylum and what archaeology can reveal about life within an institution that is so deeply entrenched in the public mind as a place of chains and brutality. Books and films portraying the worst aspects of eighteenth-century lunatic asylums and madhouses generated a stereotype that has been applied to the nineteenth-, and sometimes the twentieth-century, asylums. For many, this view of the asylum has become the only picture that they know.