Mad Tuscans and Their Families: A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy - Hardcover

Mellyn, Elizabeth W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812246128 ISBN 13: 9780812246124

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014

Synopsis

Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests.

For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communities had no institutions devoted solely to the treatment and protection of the mentally disturbed; responsibility for their long-term care fell to the family. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tuscans, like other Europeans, had come to explain madness in medical terms and the mentally disordered were beginning to move from households to hospitals. In Mad Tuscans and Their Families, Mellyn argues against the commonly held belief that these changes chart the rise of mechanisms of social control by emerging absolutist states. Rather, the story of mental illness is one of false starts, expedients, compromise, and consensus created by a wide range of historical actors.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth W. Mellyn teaches history at the University of New Hampshire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
The Tales Madness Tell

Ajax, so long as the mad fit was on him,
Himself felt joy at his wretchedness,
Though we, his sane companions, grieved indeed.
But now that he's recovered and breathes clear,
His own anguish totally masters him,
While we are no less wretched than before.
Is not this a redoubling of our grief?
—Sophocles, Ajax

Many books have been written about men and women like Ajax and the madness that gripped them; fewer have been written about the companions who watched them suffer, cared for them, and grieved over their condition. This book is not so much about people like Ajax as it is about those companions who watched, cared, and grieved. It takes as its starting point not the commonly asked question of how a past Western society represented madness, though it is certainly an important part of the investigation. Rather, it asks first and foremost what families, communities, and civic authorities did to address the disorder or, in its worst manifestations, the chaos that it visited on their households or unleashed in their streets.

The focus on action rather than representation is meant to capture, to the extent that it is possible, the lived experience of madness in a specific time and place. Such an endeavor rests on three assumptions. First, madness, or in current terms, mental disorder, is a universal and persistent feature of human history. Every society, past and present, struggles to make sense of it; every society, past and present, struggles to address it. Second, madness is at once biological and social. As a failure of a person's internal mechanisms it can produce cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states that lie outside the bounds of what a society generally considers reasonable. At the same time, it is a society's values and attitudes that mark out the bounds of the reasonable in the first place. Third, madness is a powerful category of historical analysis. Every society defines it in its own terms and tackles it with a contingent range of institutional strategies.

And its reverberations run deep. In the words of one scholar, "madness is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects." It undermines the conventions of thought, feeling, and behavior that bind people together as members of families, neighborhoods, cultures, and communities; it strains the foundations of social and civic life. Because it radiates so deeply and broadly, the study of madness as a social reality in search of a pragmatic solution offers historians an especially sharp lens onto the past.

For the richness of its archival material, the stage on which this particular drama is set is the city of Florence and its Tuscan domains from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Evidence from Florentine judicial records recalls the circumstances that led nearly three hundred men and women from all walks of life before civil and criminal courts for being allegedly mad. Some were brought there by family members trying to protect the economic and social stability of their households; others were summoned by magistrates seeking to maintain public order; still others went before the courts of their own accord to defend their sanity or even to declare their own insanity. In many of these cases, petitioners had benign intentions; they sought only to arrange long-term care for vulnerable kin. But sometimes their ends were predatory: to exploit helpless relatives, to overturn a contract, or to escape punishment for a criminal offense.

These cases uncover the complex networks of people and institutions that lived with, cared for, and in some cases cast off or exploited the mentally impaired. But they offer, too, a unique view onto great changes unfolding in late medieval and early modern Europe. Together they tell a larger story that begins in the fourteenth century when the allegedly mentally disturbed first trickled into the records of Florence's civil and criminal courts. At this point, the only long-term custodial institution was the family; hospitals generally administered acute care to the sick poor; monasteries and convents were reluctant to admit potentially dangerous or disruptive people into their communities; and the courts were just beginning to provide families with guardians for vulnerable kin.

By the seventeenth century, the social, cultural, professional, and institutional landscape of Tuscany had significantly changed. First, medical language and ideas had entered the courts. Petitioners and magistrates had come to explain madness in organic terms and the disease melancholy was recognized as the most common cause of abnormal thought and behavior. Second, learned medical practitioners in Italy and France had begun to write treatises touting their skill in resolving legal questions that involved the body in court. Their medical expertise was crucial, they maintained, in helping judges determine when, how, and in what situations particular types of madness were likely to express themselves and what that meant for the law. Finally, the mentally disordered began to move from household to hospital. In 1643, Florence established Santa Dorotea, its first institution devoted solely to the care of the severest cases of madness. About forty years later, the famous old Florentine hospital of Santa Maria Nuova followed suit, creating the "pazzeria," a mad ward for poor and indigent mad men and women. Simply put, the Tuscan who wondered what to do with a mad relative in the seventeenth century had more institutional options than his or her fourteenth-century counterpart. But what do these changes mean and how should they be interpreted?

Such transformations might inspire the telling of origins stories—the medicalization of madness, the foundation of legal medicine, the birth of the clinic, the rise of the early modern state, the roots of European penal institutions, or the formation of state or elite programs of discipline and social control. Indeed this is how many scholars have framed similar developments. Histories of psychiatry, for example, have praised the triumph of modern psychiatric practice and institutions over the superstition and barbarism that supposedly characterized the treatment of mentally disturbed men and women during the European Middle Ages. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, this view unfortunately persists. A textbook frequently assigned in American colleges and universities still claims that the "Middle Ages in Europe were largely devoid of scientific thinking and humane treatment for the mentally disturbed," a point this book categorically rejects as another example of the "enormous condescension of posterity."

Florentine society, like other late medieval and early modern European societies, like our own society, grappled with how to care for people who, on account of mental disorders, could not care for themselves or who wrought havoc in households and communities. Like us, they struggled to arrive at concrete if imperfect and shifting solutions for dealing with disturbed men and women within a society that had limited public and private resources. Given the state of their medical knowledge, the remedies available to them through the courts, and the availability—or lack thereof—of private or public custodial institutions, Florentines and their European counterparts often did the best they could with the knowledge and institutions they had.

Of course, psychiatry has had its critics. But even the most vociferous among them did little more than exchange a narrative of triumph for one of oppression or decline. Scholars in this camp claimed that the medicalization of madness and the birth of the asylum were disastrous, signaling little more than the pernicious growth of society's mechanisms of social, professional, and political control. The most famous and influential of these critiques remains that of Michel Foucault, who imagined the countryside of Renaissance Europe dotted with mad men and women, its seas speckled with ships of fools. In his vision—more provocative than accurate—townsfolk drove the mad from their gates, consigning them to lives led wandering terrestrial or watery spaces along the fringes of civil society. As objects of historical analysis, they were not so much individuals as bearers of their society's obsession with sin and the impossibility of true knowledge and the fear of God's wrath, the devil, and death. The only reasonable thing to do was to push them to the margins of society. But exile on land or sea was better than what was to come.

Foucault's real target was late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, his real goal to expose the Age of Reason as an age of confinement in which a new bourgeois ethic came to associate morality with labor and diligence, madness with unemployment and idleness. Europeans hauled madness from the margins to place it at the center of society; they locked up the mad—unemployed, idle, and poor—and dissected their disease in institutions devoted to their physical treatment and moral reform.

This book tells a story of a very different kind and one that builds in no small part on historical scholarship that has exposed the limits of teleological thinking and the deceptive linear narratives it tends to generate. Through a stunning array of new sources—the casebooks of mad doctors, patients' narratives, asylum registers, a range of legislative and administrative documents, and, more recently, judicial records—a number of historians have reexamined the role families, civic authorities, and professional groups played in the care and confinement of the mad. Michael MacDonald's classic study of the casebooks of a seventeenth-century astrological-physician and R. A. Houston's social history of madness in eighteenth-century Scotland have shown the persistent role ordinary men and women played both in defining madness even in official arenas and in caring for or abusing the mad despite the growth of a medical profession and the foundation of mental hospitals well into the eighteenth century.

Furthermore, mental hospitals were by no means a late seventeenth-century innovation or uniformly mechanisms of control in the hands of repressive social and political regimes. The first European institutions that cared for the mentally disordered appeared in Spain as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century. Over the next two centuries and beyond, similar institutions emerged throughout Europe. As Lisa Roscioni has cautioned, there is not one history of European mental institutions but many. Each institution recalls a custodial experiment whose nature was shaped largely by its immediate context. Sometimes the foundation of institutions that took on the care of the mad offered desperate families compassionate care options outside households; at other times their foundation signaled the tightening mesh of political or professional power over certain social groups or types of behavior; sometimes well-intentioned institutional missions failed in one generation, succeeded in another, only to fail again.

The three hundred or so cases that make up this study show that the practical and sometimes highly adversarial arena of the courts was also an important site of social experimentation. In the Tuscan context, conflicts and collaborations between petitioners and their officials over what to do about the mentally impaired or criminally insane generated new social, legal, and institutional remedies. They also provided predators with opportunities to exploit the vulnerable for their own gain—something that did not escape the notice of attentive magistrates. But herein lies both the creative and destructive potential of what Olwen Hufton called "the economy of makeshifts" and Nicholas Terpstra the "politics of makeshifts," that constant and opportunistic grasping for solutions to intractable realities be it a poor person trying to make ends meet, an entire society at work on providing social welfare, or families and courts tackling the problems madness posed.

Historians like neat paradigms; human experience resists them. As Terpstra has elegantly shown in his recent book on poor relief in Renaissance Bologna, the sweeping linear drive of history papers over the complex shifting dynamics that characterize a society's efforts to confront its challenges. It is that spirit of experimentation, dynamism, dialogue, and exchange that I invoke here.

The Legacy of Culture

Although historians have brought the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century experience of madness more sharply into view, the social reality of madness has been harder to capture for medieval and early modern Europe because of the fragmentary nature of the period's archival records and, perhaps counterintuitively, because of the extraordinary richness of its cultural tradition. Decades of excellent scholarship have shown that medieval and early modern Europeans thought a great deal about behavior that defied their sense of what it meant to be rational. During this period, the European intellectual and cultural elite contemplated madness in art, literature, philosophy, and theology, passing on to posterity moving visions of mad lovers, melancholy artists, brooding scholars, frenzied heroes, courtly fools, and the divinely or demonically possessed. The mad and their madnesses were living symbols of the wages of sin, the consequences of immoderate passion, and the vanity of earthly life.

And indeed such representations of madness have important and revealing histories. As the fifteenth century drew to a close, for example, personifications of folly captured the European imagination with renewed vigor. From Sebastian Brandt's (1457-1521) ship of fools to Erasmus's (1466-1536) drunken trollop Stultitia to Cervantes's (1547-1616) addled knight Don Quixote, artists and authors invoked folly simultaneously to entertain their audiences and to remind them of the fragility, uncertainty, and wretchedness of the human condition and the glory of the kingdom of God.

Tuscans also availed themselves of folly's symbolic potential. On June 22, 1514, the first day of the celebrations for the festival of Florence's patron saint San Giovanni, one of the floats that appeared along the procession route was a fusta piena di matti—a ship of fools. Prancing along behind it were about thirty men dressed as devils, holding hooks and bells. At one point they grabbed someone from the crowd and tossed him in the ship, barring his escape unless he paid a bounty. But these topsy-turvy, carnivalesque performances of folly that entertained as much as they challenged social norms bear little resemblance to the men and women who appear in court records. They tell us a good deal about how madness was imagined, little about how it was lived.

As the sixteenth century progressed, melancholy, at once a physical disease, mental disposition, and potentially perilous spiritual condition, became all the rage among Europe's elite. For historians of northern Europe, melancholy's heightened profile was an expression of deep psychological anxiety triggered by the turbulent era of religious reform in western Christendom. In England, Michael MacDonald connected the melancholy v...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0812246128
• ISBN 13: 9780812246124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304