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

H. C. Erik Midelfort. A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999. ix, 438 pp., illus. $55.00.

Having started off in the early 1970s as a historian of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German witchcraft, Erik Midelfort soon extended his research interests to madness in Germany during this same period. After his book on Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville, Virginia, University Press of Virginia, 1994), Midelfort has now presented us with a second, much more encompassing book on madness in sixteenth-century Germany. In fact, this book covers a long sixteenth century, from 1480 to 1620, where Germany functions as shorthand for the German-speaking peoples, although the odd Flemish painter (Hugo van der Goes) and some Dutch physicians (Jason Pratensis, Pieter van Foreest, Levinus Lemnius) have also been included. Another physician of Dutch origin, Johan Wier, figures, due to his court physicianship to the Duke of Jülich-Cleves, as a German physician with the name of Johann Weyer.

Midelfort’s scope is a broad one; he intends to offer a history of madness, not just a history of psychiatry avant la lettre. This is a history of madness, moreover, which attempts to focus on how sixteenth-century Germans, both learned theologians, jurists, or physicians and lay or “ordinary” people, categorized, understood, and experienced madness and how they treated those they regarded as mad. Of course, this ambitious undertaking presupposes the availability and use of different types of sources. Midelfort has indeed drawn information from an impressive variety of sources, ranging from learned treatises and legal statutes and proceedings to literary and artistic sources, miracle books, and hospital archives.

In addition to an introduction, an epilogue, a fairly extensive bibliography (including primary sources), and a useful index, the book contains seven chapters. They successively discuss a number of contemporary illnesses such as St. Vitus’ dance and demonic possession, Luther’s and Paracelsus’s ideas about a world gone mad, academic medical conceptions of madness, and the filtering of these medical views into the world of law and their effect on the insanity defense, particularly with respect to witchcraft. The fifth chapter on folly and especially court fools more or less functions as a caesura between the previous chapters on the views of learned theology, medicine, and the law and the last two chapters which are dedicated to the actual treatment of the mad. Chapters 6 and 7 are the most refreshing, for they show in a more direct way how people experienced and coped with madness. We first learn about a specifically Catholic healing strategy, pilgrimages by and for the mad to shrines of particular saints, as reported in so-called miracle books. The final chapter deals with two at that time new, well-documented hospitals: the Lutheran hospital in the reformed Cistercian monastery at Haina in Hesse and the newly built Catholic Juliusspital in Würzburg.

Midelfort succeeds very well in acquainting the reader with a world which was substantially different from ours. Time and again he warns against transplanting our own labels on sixteenth-century forms of madness or what was then recognized as such. Understanding cultures of the past requires that one take one’s own culture no longer for granted. Midelfort’s book is therefore highly recommended reading for psychiatric students and psychiatrists.

Midelfort moreover convincingly demonstrates the importance of religion with its notions of sin and the devil in sixteenth-century culture and in conceptions and experiences of madness. He also shows that particular forms of madness became in due time more or less prevalent. Thus the cases of demonic possession were in the second half of the sixteenth century on the increase at the same time as the witch trials. This was also the case with melancholy which, according to Midelfort, was on the rise to such an extent that the period...