[This article examines the evidential and procedural aspects of claims based on mental incapacity in English courtrooms in the ‘long’ 18 century. It employs a frame the author has termed ‘manifest madness’ to analyse how such claims were articulated and elaborated at trial in this period. This analysis reveals, first, the substantive significance of the accused’s conduct; second, the part playe...

A fine-grained analysis of the transcript of a Bangladeshi woman's lament is used to argue for an anthropology of "madness" that attends closely to performance and performativity. The emergent, interactive production of wept speech, together with the conflicting use to which it is put by the performer and her relatives, is linked problematically to performance genres and to ethnopsychiatric ind...

Revels in madness will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars, especially for those looking for more obscure figures, like the German Romantic psychiatrists J C Reil, J C A Heinroth, and K W Ideler, whom Thiher describes in detail since few medical libraries have their books. In his introduction, Thiher indicates his distance from Foucault's "brilliant, influential ... but misguid...

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, notab...

Listening to Unreason: Foucault and Wittgenstein on Reason and the Unreasonable Man

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...