Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy by James E. Moran (review)

This is an excellent book: it offers a rich and deep inquiry into the legal and transatlantic histories of lunacy across place and space, also illuminating imperial legal practices around insanity. Moran's original history provides a new set of insights into the interpretation of insanity through laws, the way law was used by different people, and the translation of imperial law into colonial contexts. This has not been achieved for the transatlantic historical site in such a deliberate and detailed way before now, and Moran manages this despite what he says is an "asymmetry" of primary source material between his research sites (234). In finding ways to capture this shared history of lunacy investigation law, the book makes a strong intellectual contribution to its discipline and to inquiry into madness over time and jurisdictions.

Moran asks exceptionally good questions of his research data, including ones informed by a now intensively and extensively researched international field. The legal-historical approach to this topic is immensely valuable. A key strength of this book lies in its law and history expertise in relation to lunacy and the laws of lunacy in practice. Moran also delivers on an especially difficult aspect: looking at more than one jurisdiction and showing sufficiently deep knowledge of both. The book is richly researched and defined, and weaves together a set of interesting arguments informed and underpinned by a strong evidence base, also bringing together the debates informing recent historiography, such as the roles played by families in relation to the asylum, and the histories of institutions in colonial settings.

Different chapters of this book outline madness as a legal and familial experience in the transatlantic world. Moran examines the long history of lunacy laws and legal definitions of madness and insanity, family struggles over property, and the various dimensions of madness in the community, such as localized stories of family, neighbours, and the asylum. A particular strength of this work is the appearance of individual cases throughout the book, with the stories of civil law and lunacy investigations adding new information to our historical understandings of the way past communities managed and coped with "irrational behaviour," as Moran describes it (11). The public nature of legal processes also means that ideas about madness could be shared and circulated, shaping private and public responses to it over time, as this book highlights.

This is an important book for the reasons mentioned, but also because it opens up new avenues of research exploration. It also takes earlier work by Moran on lay descriptions of insanity – ideas that are useful in a range of contexts and have had an impact on many studies of colonial institutional records, including my own – and places it in a deeper and focused context. His account in chapter 7 of "localising madness" in New Jersey is a highlight of his argument because it illustrates the transmission of imperial legal knowledge and its application in the North American setting. These ideas deserve to be understood as part of a wider social history of medicine and institutions.

One of the most interesting aspects of civil law cases of insanity tested in the courts is the rich evidence of family testimony. In several chapters of this book, Moran uses the language and insights of family members in cases of insanity. Family struggles over property, for instance, remind historians of the complexities of mental health in relation to other areas of law, such as inheritance. The case of Anne Ashe in chapter 4 shows how a "spectacular family feud" unravelled two influential families in the north of England. The account of a messy marriage, including claims of Anne's insanity, and of contestation over the family estate tells us much about the power relations of marriage and the way madness might challenge family business in public and unpleasant ways. Moran's attention to the themes of gender and class is excellent, especially...