Theophrastus of Eresus: sources for his life, writings, thoughts and influence

conviction, for she shows how, alongside ideas of the mad as in some way privileged or licensed by God, cared for within the home, there were always attempts to separate the mad into hospitals and "mad-towers", to exile them or to canalise their madness into socially more acceptable bounds. Whether on the follies of love, theological discussions of the access of the mad to the sacraments, notably baptism and the mass, or the spread of "court fools", Laharie always has something interesting to say. But beyond France her expertise is scrappy. The list of names and dates of earlier writers on madness, pp. 117-120, will raise many eyebrows. She does not appear to know the most useful survey of madness in Antiquity (by J. L. Heiberg) or the directly relevant studies of madness in Byzantium (by Michael Dols) and in the Muslim world (Dols and Manfred Ullmann), both of whom discuss the changing role of the mad in relation to theology and to society. Many of her points were made already by Basil Clarke, Mental disorder in Earlier Britain (1975), a book far wider in its temporal and geographical scope than its title suggests. German medieval medicine is almost entirely absent, while the work of Michael McVaugh and Luis Garcia Ballester on medieval Spain is also neglected. Extending her gaze beyond France would have sharpened her perception of the different ways in which different societies reacted to the mad. But it would be wrong to end on a carping note, for Laharie has given us much food for thought, not least in her unusual selection of 82 plates, which range from the suicide of Judas, on a capital at Autun cathedral, to Turold, the pet dwarf on the Bayeux tapestry, and from the visitation of an academic by the devil, to the cure of a frenetic (Laharie wrongly says "melancholic") by St Louis. In this book, madness is truly seen within medieval society as a whole.