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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.1 (2000) 109-110



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Book Review

A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany


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

This book explores how early modern Germans understood and experienced mental illness and disease. Midelfort has set a difficult task for himself. A sixteenth-century chronic mania known as St. Vitus dance and the remarkable increase in reported cases of demonic possession--illnesses that we no longer experience that are briefly described in the opening chapter--illustrate the problems that the author faces in deciphering the written evidentiary material and cultural idiom of the period.

Eschewing modern sociological and psychological theories, especially the radical oversimplifications of Foucault, and the temptation to translate late medieval and Renaissance diseases into today's medical terminology, Midelfort reminds us that "one of the major ways in which the sixteenth century differed from our own is the deeply felt and broadly all-encompassing religious language of the major thinkers of four or five hundred years ago" (79). 1 A comparison of Martin Luther and Paracelsus shows how these two individuals, who disagreed on virtually everything else, saw sin as a disease, their age as a time of increased demonic presence, and the resulting "madness as an ultimate threat to the order and peace to which God called all true believers" (138).

Moderns not only find it difficult to grasp such religious notions of madness, but are equally baffled by the strange medical approaches of the period. While religious observers became increasingly obsessed with demonic possession, Renaissance physicians, largely due to the massive revival of traditional Galenic medicine at German universities, "diagnosed the troubles of their age as an epidemic of melancholy" (230). The cultural impact was dramatic, as evidenced especially in the work of Johann Weyer, a psychiatrist who used medical melancholy to develop the legal insanity defense against accusations of witchcraft. Others, especially thoughtful artists and writers who were less focused on demons or melancholy, came to believe that mankind was profoundly threatened by stupidity, what they called folly. When describing their world as full of madmen, they did not impute to these individuals, frequently kept as court fools by German princes, any particular wisdom as has often been assumed. "Fools were . . . essentially outsiders, to be beaten, manipulated, coddled, and laughed at" (276).

The book also examines some of the more popular practices and vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek relief in pilgrimage or the newly founded hospitals. The Protestant Reformation had occasioned a deep crisis in the cult of saints but, beginning in the 1570s with the Catholic Reformation, southern Germany and Austria experienced a revival that led to "the greatest surge in European shrine formation . . . in the early seventeenth century" (278). In the miracle books, which [End Page 109] recorded healings at local shrines (excerpts of which were often published to prove the efficacy of Catholic doctrine and practice against Protestant unbelievers), "we hear the voices of ordinary people describing their problems in their own uneducated way" (311). They perceived madness "as mysterious, uncanny, sudden in onset and in remission, possibly of divine or demonic origin" (290). It is through these miracle tales that the author brings us closest to the popular understanding of madness in the sixteenth century.

Finally, for those poor tormented souls who found no relief in medicine, prayer, exorcism, or pilgrimage, there were the hospitals. A comparison of the new hospitals of the Protestant landgraviate of Hesse and the Catholic bishopric of Würzburg shows how Lutherans and Catholics addressed the same social problem. Midelfort's findings on this subject are, indeed, surprising: "Philip of Hesse, while moving his territory into the new world of evangelical social institutions, managed to create a hospital system that was medieval in inspiration, whereas Julias Echter von Mespelbrunn [bishop of Würzburg], in trying to stem the tide of Protestantism, created a hospital system that . . . looked forward with religious and therapeutic optimism" (384).

Midelfort has written a masterful, innovative...

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