Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany

Early in 1582 his princely grace Duke Wilhelm the Younger of Braunschweig-Luneburg took to roaming the streets at night, shooting off pistols at imaginary enemies and shouting into the dark. His advisers ordered him confined, but in August of that year he attacked his devoted wife, Dorothea, with a pair of tailor's shears. What was to be done? Wilhelm was in good company. During the 16th century close to thirty German dukes, land-graves, margraves, and counts, plus one Holy Roman emperor, were known as mad - so mentally disordered that serious steps had to be taken to remove them from office or to obtain medical care for them. This book studies these princes (along with a few princesses) as a group and in context. The result is a flood of new light on the history of Renaissance medicine and of psychiatry, on German politics in the century of the Reformation, and on the shifting Renaissance definitions of madness. This work details the expansion of a learned, medical vocabulary with which contemporaries could describe these demented monarchs, as we watch the rise to prominence of the "melancholy prince".
It also documents the transition from the brutal deposition of mad princes during the late Middle Ages to the imposition of medical therapy by the middle of the 16th century, taking note of the competing claims of medicine and theology. "Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany" takes a new look at the issues raised in Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" and provides an alternative framework of interpretation. A variety of professional and institutional discourses competed for dominance over Renaissance princes who were considered mad and an amazingly broad spectrum of therapeutic options - from herbal baths to the application of dog entrails to the inducement of hemorrhoids - were open to relatives and courtiers seeking to stave off a constitutional crisis by curing the monarch of his madness. As historians of psychiatry should appreciate, Midelfort's attention to Renaissance diagnostic categories suggests how modern diagnoses inform the perception and experience of mental illness. Students of political theory should be intrigued by the implications of madness for the legitimacy of the state.
And the general reader is invited to visit a lively gallery of Renaissance rulers, caught up in a variety of psychic and moral dilemmas that ultimately pushed them over the edge.