Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (review)

This challenging book makes a significant contribution to the study of madness in early-modern Europe, an area of rising scholarly interest of late; it provides as well a suggestive examination of the links between early-modern psychology and the emergence of the modern medical discipline of psychiatry, a lineage long identified by psychological practitioners, including Freud, and given a controversial interpretation, redolent with troubling images of power by Michel Foucault in more recent times.

Lederer's work, though, is not one of grand theory spinning, like Foucault's. Instead it explores "on the ground" the various permutations that developed in early-modern Bavaria in the practice of "spiritual physic," the religious discipline that aimed to treat the psychologically afflicted. The chief mechanisms used to care for troubled, possessed, and senseless people in the early-modern territory were penance, pilgrimage, and exorcism. The application of these remedies increased in the counter-reforming decades at the end of the sixteenth century, with encouraging directives issued from the Wittelsbach duke's Privy and Aulic Councils downward. This book has at least four aims, and thus is difficult to summarize here except in the briefest way. Lederer examines the intellectual foundations of spiritual physic, as explicated in the works of late-medieval and early-modern Catholic theologians and state officials. Secondly, he explores this religious therapy as it developed in Bavaria's villages and towns, but more frequently at the territory's numerous saints' and Marian shrines, which, in the confessionally-charged atmosphere of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became symbols of Catholic identity, but also places noteworthy for treating the mentally ill. In these chapters Lederer ranges broadly across the lush landscape of Bavarian pilgrimage, although he comes to concentrate most significantly on two places —Benediktbeuren and Pürten—which were recognized at the time for their effectiveness in curing the mentally ill. The third aim of Madness, Religion and the State is to chart the increasing disaffection of state officials and learned theologians in the later seventeenth century from the practices of spiritual physic. As the centrifugal and disorderly potential inherent in treatments of mental illness rooted in penance, pilgrimage, and exorcism became increasingly obvious to Bavaria's officialdom, confinement emerged to replace spiritual physic as the treatment of choice. The rise of the Holy Spirit Hospice in Munich as one of the primary asylums for those with mental disorders exemplified this trend. And finally, the fourth focus of Lederer's study examines the legacy of these practices and their similarities and dissimilarities to modern psychological praxis.

It is impossible in a short review to capture the richness of Lederer's work. Nearly everyone will find something in it that fascinates, from the case histories he presents of men and women who were made to atone for their maladies in sackcloth and ashes, to the comparisons Lederer makes between practices in Bavaria and those championed by state officials and intellectuals elsewhere. Not everyone may agree with all of Lederer's conclusions. I found his frequent invocation of an early-modern "crisis" reminiscent of the chimerical anxiety of Jean Delumeau's works, even as it appeared too accepting of the labored rhetoric many early-modern advocates of spiritual physic used to describe their craft. But with this substantial study David Lederer establishes himself as a major historian of psychology and piety, and he takes his place alongside Michael Macdonald, Erik Midelfort, and Lyndal Roper, as a scholar who has set a new high standard for those who choose to explore the discontents of the mind in the early-modern world.