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 Rich of Jiilich-Cleves, to the mystical strangeness of that most famous sixteenth-century melancholic, the Emperor Rudolf II, and the "mortal fury" of Rudolf's illegitimate son, Julius Caesar, who brutally murdered a barber-surgeon's daughter and then "flung the pieces of her flesh all around the room" (p. 141). But these are not just titillating stories. Midelfort poses here important questions about the definition of madness, about treatment, about the competing ambitions of Galenists, Paracelsians, irregular healers, and spiritual advisors, and about the deeper political perturbations produced when princes went "so mad that they needed to be controlled or set aside" (p. 23). Prudently, Midelfort does not generalize from these princely particularities, not does he foolishly labour to demonstrate a "lineage of madness" in the houses involved. Rather he mines a rich documentary lode in search of the meaning of madness in this historical context and, perhaps more fascinating, unveils the political implications of princely lunacy, for madness was "more disruptive of dynastic ambitions than either death or minority rule" (p. 45). Midelfort's princes lived from the late fifteenth until the mid seventeenth century. Over this period he charts several changes. Most obvious was the move from confinement or dethronement to therapy. In his earliest cases-those of the late fifteenth century-the mentally incompetent were often forcibly removed from their positions of power and frequently incarcerated. In general there were very few efforts made to seek treatment, mainly because these rulers were not viewed as mentally ill at all. Thus their relatives and ministers felt no need to call upon experts in the guise of either doctors or exorcists. The diagnosis of possession was not applied to ruling princes in late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century Germany. At least by the 1560s, however, much had changed. Not only do we also begin to find mention of mad princesses (although too few in number to postulate gendered differences) but also extensive therapeutic records, as princes were "beginning to obtain serious medical attention". While the majority of physicians who attended mad princes were Galenists, Paracelsian …