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 miracle books to round out the picture of the mad in the sixteenth century. Although the percentage of the mad who went on pilgrimages or who were cured at healing shrines was always small (only 7 per cent of all cases reported in the Franconian miracle books), these sources expose the madness of simple men and women and how they and their families sought cures for mental disturbances. The final sort of "madness" to which Midelfort turns is madness defined as "simple helplessness", that is, the madness of those who found their way into hospitals. Midelfort uses the records of two reformation hospitals, one in a Catholic and one in a Protestant part of Germany, to discuss the relative medicalization of madness in the sixteenth century. Not surprisingly, Midelfort's findings support what is now pretty much a new orthodoxy on early modern hospitals: medical treatments were attempted, conditions were not horrible, and the mad were neither mistreated nor forced to labour. They were "certainly not part of any 'great confinement"' (p. 383). The strength of Midelfort's book rests to a large extent on the deep knowledge of sixteenth-century society, legal thought, and religion he brings to the subject. His earlier work on witchcraft informs his lucid treatment here, allowing him to weave witchcraft persecutions into the larger fabric of madness in the sixteenth century without naively claiming that "witches were mad". The sweep of his inquiry, his willingness to open the boundaries of madness beyond our contemporary understanding of it and to see the mad with sixteenth-century eyes make the book absolutely compelling and overwhelmingly persuasive. If one might quibble that not quite everything he treats-such as social impotence or contrived folly-fits so neatly within the domain of madness, or that in expanding the frontiers of madness, its definition also begins to blur, Midelfort would only reply that if we restrict madness to "a few categories that serve our political or moral purposes ... we do it an injustice" (p. 321) and simultaneously deny the validity of sixteenth-century reality and the subtlety of sixteenth-century thought.