Mad Tuscans and Their Families: A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy by Elizabeth W. Mellyn (review)

A sixteenth-century petitioner to the Florentine civil court candidly remarked that “the care of a madman is a heavy burden” (24). In this welcome book, Elizabeth Mellyn examines the nature of that care and how it was distributed in premodern Italy. Analyzing 300 court cases heard in Florence between 1350 and 1670, she shows how families, communities and civic authorities tackled the practical issues posed by various forms of mental disorder. Until the establishment of local institutions for the mentally ill and impaired in the 1670 s, care remained an ad hoc arrangement of uncertain duration—one that was contingent on the ability and willingness of relatives to provide it. Consequently, it fell to the courts to develop workable, often opportunistic solutions for long-term care. The result was a “politics of makeshift” that turned legal tribunals into important sites of social experimentation. Informed throughout by deep historical empathy, Mellyn tacks her way through changing judicial competencies, frames the construction of legal cases by court protocols, and signals problems in fitting vernacular descriptors of mental disorders into pre-existing Latin legal categories. Although the book lacks a sustained argument, it successfully moves the study of madness beyond literary representations toward a richer understanding of how mental disorders impacted one premodern society.

The 300 cases examined here show a startling gender disparity. Mellyn sampled extant court records at two-year intervals beginning in 1350, with the bulk of cases heard between 1540 and 1609. The overall sample is divided almost equally between civil and criminal cases that represent a cross-section of society—old and young, rich and poor, married and widowed.

Eighty-four percent of civil cases centered on the madness of men; that figure rose to 89% in criminal cases. Such disparities stem partly from the fact that adult Florentine women were considered minors in the eyes of the law; the implications of a disordered female mind were far less significant from a property standpoint and thus did not require legal action. Still, women appear more frequently in court records as petitioners greatly affected by “the problem of male madness” (21).

The first chapter considers guardianship arrangements for the mentally ill and impaired, whose care fell to Tuscan families. As a legal mechanism, guardianship aimed to protect vulnerable individuals from exploitation and the family unit from social and financial disruption. Founded in the 1390 s, the civil Court of Wards assumed responsibility for guardianship cases because Roman law considered the mentally incapacitated to be legal minors. This court safeguarded vulnerable persons from possible harm and appointed a suitable guardian when no relatives could assume that task. Taken as a whole, court interventions also shielded customary systems of property transmission by favoring close kin as guardians over more distant relatives, even though Florentines used this court instrumentally to adjudicate intra-lineal disputes over patrimony. Mobilizing richly textured case studies, Mellyn finds that families and the courts negotiated these divergent interests effectively in the search for practical, long-term solutions.

Chapter 2 turns to the criminally insane, who hovered on the edge of legal personhood. Roman law held that the mad lacked informed intent and hence were not liable for homicide or property damage; consequently, they were incarcerated or confined at home rather than punished outright. Since public solutions to the problem of criminal insanity were historically long in the making, “the fate of the criminally insane changed but little” over the course of the study (73). Mellyn adds an interesting twist to this legal history by showing that relatives sometimes claimed “youthful indiscretion” was a type of insanity in order to mitigate sentences for offenders under age 25. Here some comparative material from other judicial locales would better situate these strategies.

Disordered economic behaviors form the core of the next chapter. Florentine statutes increasingly associated prodigal spending with madness: the spendthrift joined the...