Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

moral corruption, God's punishment for crime, as the favourite case of Herod's
madness exemplified. Yet, while madness often resulted in "death and damnation"2, it
could also appear as a test, "serving as penance and leading to self-knowledge,
confession, and reform"3, and it could even be regarded as holy. Medieval minds
could thus regard madness as religious, as moral or as medical, as divine or as
diabolical, as good or bad. In any case, however, it is caused and can only be cured by
supernatural intervention.
But even if the pervasive influence of the church's attitude towards madness
throughout the Middle Ages was the chief determinant of social, legal, and aesthetic
responses to the symptoms and effects of mental aberration, it did not preclude
scientific inquiry into its causes because efforts were indeed made by both priests and
physicians to distinguish between demonic possessions and other causes of madness -
physical as well as psychological.4 Historians of the theory and treatment of psychopathology
during the Middle Ages have disclosed the various ways in which medieval
philosophers and physicians sought to understand and provide remedies for madness,
from drugs to simple forms of psychotherapy employed by the Arabs of the 8th
through the 12th centuries to the surgical means used by the doctors at the celebrated
medical school of Salerno.5 Nonetheless, the cultural effects of the assumption that
the roots of madness are sin cannot be underestimated.6
Even though there were examples to the contrary, such as the creation of Bethlem
Hospital - more commonly known as Bedlam - in England in 1247, through the
Middle Ages and well beyond, crazy people rarely had any special, formal provision
made for them. At that point the mad usually lived as fools or village idiots in their
social environment. Only if they were dangerous or an extreme nuisance were they
confined to a cage and put on show or locked into dungeons. The degree of their social
integration largely depended on the degree of their "otherness". They were hardly
2 Doob, Penelope: Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature.- New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974.- p. 54
3 Ibid., p. 12
4 For further detail see: Talbot, C. H.: Medicine in Medieval England.- London: Oldbourne History of Science Library,
1967.-
5 Cf. Alexander, Franz; Selesnick, Sheldon: The History of Psychiatry: an Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought and Practice
from Prehistoric Times to the Present.- New York: Harper & Row, 1966.- pp. 61-66.-
6 Judith Neaman suggests that the major difference between the medieval and the modern response to insanity is that what
the theologian of the Middle Ages called sin, we call sickness and that the conception of madness as sickness or disease
is as medieval as it is modern. The notion that disease, both physical and mental, is punishment for moral corruption is,
however, characteristically medieval. (Neaman, Judith: Suggestion of the Devil: The Origins of Madness.- New York:
Anchor Books, 1975.- p. 55)
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