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

Mad Tuscans and Their Families is a fascinating interdisciplinary study, which uses medical and legal sources to understand how families, communities, and civic agencies dealt with the issue of what to do with, and how to care for, people with a mental disorder. That is, those whom contemporaries called ‘mad’, and whose behaviour sometimes caused chaos in Tuscany for both the family, community, and the state.

This study analyses 300 legal cases, ranging from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Almost half the cases are civil cases and the remainder criminal. The majority of cases survive from the sixteenth century onwards, particularly after the 1530s when the ducal system of justice operated and the legal records are in Italian rather than Latin. From 1540, a broader range of Tuscans, not just elite families, began to use the civil courts, and all strata of society are represented in the criminal courts. Gender plays an important part in this narrative. The overwhelming majority of people (over 80 per cent) who appeared in both civil and criminal cases as mad were male, while a substantial minority of petitioners were female (over 40 per cent). Women were perpetual legal minors and were most vulnerable when the male breadwinner was mad and could not support the women and children in his family, threatening its survival and that of his wider patrilineage. There would have been many more people with a mental disorder than appeared in the courts and it is clear from this study that the mentally impaired were not shunned or ostracised by their families and societies. Families looked after their mentally impaired kin and only turned to the civil courts as a last resort when support structures collapsed, confusion reigned, or abuse, neglect, or exploitation of the mentally impaired person was possible.

Chapter 1 examines petitions brought before the Tuscan magistrato dei pupilli ed adulti (court of wards), which dealt with the estates and guardianship of minors and mentally impaired adults. The women who appeared in court were the widows, mothers, and aunts ‘acting as guardians of patrimony’ (p. 21), protecting their family’s estate from either the mad person or from rapacious kin. The issue of what to do with criminally insane kin was a problem for the family, community, and the state (Chapter 2), but in general they aimed to protect, and contain rather than punish. Apart from care by the family, the usual outcome, there were few other options. There was a ward for the criminally insane in the communal debtors’ prison, but the mentally ill tended not to stay there for long. Galley service was an option that some prisoners were assigned to, or chose, to ensure an end to their sentence. The families of young men under 25 years of age who committed violent crimes for the first time often portrayed such young men as hot-headed and of little mind, that is mad, in order to seek a mitigation of their sentence. These pleas were often successful. Elizabeth Mellyn argues that the sentences imposed on those deemed mad were often the result of negotiation and compromise.

Contemporary understandings of madness shifted over the three centuries covered in this study. In the thirteenth century, St Francis of Assisi’s renunciation of all his worldly goods, including giving his father’s earnings to the Church, led to his canonisation. In the mercantile culture of Tuscany, during the sixteenth century or either of the two previous centuries, he would have been declared profligate, deemed mad, and made a ward (Chapter 3). The system of guardianship was designed to preserve what Mellyn calls ‘patrimonial rationality’. Spendthrift habits that diluted a family’s wealth were viewed as a cause for urgent family and state intervention. By the mid-sixteenth century...