A history of madness in sixteenth-century Germany

Healers and healing in early modern Italy

fool" or the wily "artificial fool" like Friedrich Taubmann who served as "merry counselor' to the electors of Saxony. Midelfort's discussion of court buffoons, like his closing chapters on pilgrims and hospital inmates, exploits little-known, or insufficiently utilized, archival and printed literature in ways that help overturn facile generalizations. 'Pilgrims in Search of Reason' mines mirac...

Mad princes of renaissance Germany

Madness mesmerizes, and the madness of the great and powerful cannot help but exert a magnetic pull on the historical imagination. In Mad princes of renaissance Germany, H C Erik Midelfort constructs a series of linked microhistories around the mental illnesses of about twenty German princes and princesses. The manifestations of their disorders ranged from the "weakness" of old duke Wilhelm the...

Steno on muscles

The major question, however, is why did the shifts occur when they did? Midelfort does not leave us guessing here. One cannot, he insists, argue that madness was becoming medicalized, or that "physicians were more knowledgeable or humane in 1600 than a century earlier". Other, more political considerations drove the transition from confinement to care. In an age of nascent bureaucratization, as...

Madness and morals. Ideas on insanity in the nineteenth century

The Role of Language in Accusations of Witchcraft in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain

Linguistic factors played a significant role in the origin and spread of accusations of witchcraft in Early Modern Spain. The preoccupation with witches’ words is at its root a preoccupation about the power of speech and, to a great extent, of female speech. Studies in some Early European countries have connected aggressive female speech styles with accusations of witchcraft, and this article o...