annual report 2011 - Office for Research - Northwestern University

Anne M. Koenig
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
The place of the mentally ill in society and understandings
of what constitutes mental illness are contested topics
even in today’s world of modern medicine and societal
resources. The modern world is often quite literally baffled
by mental illness, unsure where the responsibilities for its
causation, diagnosis, and care truly lie. Although conscious
of their own successes, but perhaps even more so of their
shortcomings, scholars and nonscholars alike have tended
to think that people before the modern age were therefore
especially barbaric in their approach to mental impairment.
The medieval world, so the narrative goes, must have
40 Annual Report 2011 | Excellence in Research
Above: photo of an 18th century fresco in the Church of St. Leonard in
Inchenhofen, Germany, depicting the saint releasing victims of physical and spiritual
captivity. Top left inset: excerpt from a 14th century manuscript of Constantinus
Africanus' medical text, the Viaticum, showing the entry for the condition of
“frenzy” (frenesis). All photos courtesy of Anne Koenig.
viewed the mentally ill as demonically possessed and shunned
them out of fear and superstition.
Yet Anne M. Koenig, history graduate program, has uncovered
a picture of late-medieval society in which ideas about
mental distress were multilayered and the mentally impaired
themselves were far more integrated into society than
previously suspected. Drawing on a variety of late medieval
sources, her work brings into focus a network of complex
understandings of and reactions to mental illness. Her work
argues that contemporary medical texts were quite concerned
with cognitive ailments and emotional health and that late
medieval miracle narratives bear witness to structures and
processes of support, management, and healing for the mad.
Perhaps most significantly, by combing the municipal financial
records in the archives of Munich and Nuremberg, Koenig
found that city leaders were routinely confronted with the
need to manage the mentally impaired in their midst. Official
reactions to these “problematic mad” ran the gamut: from
expulsion and temporary imprisonment to gifts, privileges, and
a commitment to ensure their long-term well-being inside the
city. Koenig argues that these encounters with the “urban mad”
helped to define and to map the town itself, as well as to carve
out the contours of a surprisingly progressive urban social
responsibility.
Koenig’s research and writing have been funded by a Fulbright
Grant, the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship, and the
Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship. Her faculty
advisor is Dyan Elliott, history.