A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (review)

A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany. By H. C. Erik Midelfort. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xvi, 438. $55.00.)

Those who prefer close, contextual studies to the grand vistas of idealist histories have never warmed to the paradigm of "madness and civilization" proffered by Foucault and his disciples. For two decades H. C. Erik Midelfort has patiently laid siege to Foucault's claim that fools and crazies graced the streets and rivers of early modern Europe before "the great confinement." In his new book on madness in Germany from about 1480 to 1620, he gainsays that claim while providing new foundations for the study of madness, mental illness, and suicide.

Midelfort does so with all the dexterity of an interdisciplinary historian: as a philologist well-versed in the vernacular and Latin traditions; as a historian of ideas competent to move easily between the specializations of theology, law, and medicine; and as a social historian capable of translating the raw data of archival registers and account books into meaningful narrative. To this rare combination of skills, he adds a keen sense of how it all fits together in its historical context, allowing the reader access to the wide-ranging experiences of madness among the historical agents and institutions under study.

The panorama is shaped by a series of bird's-eye views. After distancing himself from reductionist histories, preconceived notions of gender, and the terminology of modern psychology, Midelfort addresses the knotty language of his sources. Monastic doctors and clerical moralizers hardly suffered from the anxiety of influence; their "case histories" often confront the historian as near-verbatim borrowings from classic texts, problematizing the search for reliable data. The author emphasizes this issue and pursues it throughout: observation was often dependent on prior expectations, and the madness of artistic melancholy or outbreaks of St. Vitus's dance were (and have continued to be) "created and structured" by various cultural traditions. Despite disagreements over particulars, consensus reigned on the perpetual activity of demonic forces, especially intense after 1560--a process Midelfort calls "the demonization of the world." Contemporaries often experienced and characterized mental problems as demonic possession. There was a correlation between possession and the heightened insistence on piety and social disciplining in an age of increasing apocalyptic fervor. Whereas elite texts lead us to expect cases of possession to be both gender-specific and attributable to sinful ways, statistics drawn from the archives yield an eventual leveling of the sexes; Midelfort shows, too, that many victims had led, by all accounts, pious and upright lives before their troubles began. He presents a variety of examples to suggest that men and women, in the uninhibited language of the possessed, "constructed an idiom in which to experience and express their religious doubts and their miseries," not in terms taught them by their admonishing clergy, but through a "grammar for their experience of the world." Aptly and ironically put, "diabolical obsession and possession is the dark side of the history of piety" (p. 78).

Chapters 2-7 range from medical and legal theory to the creation of hospitals during the eras of reformation and confessionalization. Otherwise dissimilar thinkers like Luther and Paracelsus shared conceptions of sin as disease and of living "in these last days." They agreed with contemporary Germans that God's salvation was "an intensely rational, health-giving process" that ordered society without and justified within, producing an explicit demarcation between the "sanity" of the saved and the bestial irrationality of those Luther considered "heretics," or those Paracelsus feared as the multiplying (non-denominational) hypocrites and anti-Christs of the End Time. Chapter 3 traces the rise of "Galenic observation" in the medical literature on mental disorders. Whereas academic physicians had combined a crude herbalism with a "popular spirit lore in which pharmacy was confused with demonology," the reception of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen after 1550 accompanied a renewed impetus toward...