Carole
Collier Frick
Book
Review
Elizabeth
W. Mellyn, Mad Tuscans and Their Families:
A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy. University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2014), 304 pages,
8 illus. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4612-4
1> Elizabeth Mellyn’s book Mad Tuscans and Their Families is a
thorough investigation of communal efforts in Tuscany to restrain, contain, and
control public safety and family property in the face of the threat of madness. It looks at court cases from the fourteenth
through the seventeenth century. But
this study is about money as much as it is about madness. It is about the need to secure patriarchal
lineage in the honor-based culture that was pre-modern Italy, about ensuring
public order, and about balancing the concerns of the state with that of the
family. The cause or causes of mental
illness is not as important to these families as are the effects of mental
problems on family honor within the larger community.
2> The primary sources used by
the author to explore her subject are taken from the court systems and other
institutions of the city of Florence and its Tuscan domains. Here, Mellyn investigates over 300 cases where
desperate petitioners have asked the court’s relief in issues of guardianship,
criminally insane behavior, or the reckless disregard for family property in
the face of disruptive “mad” behavior by a family member. (The author is careful to preserve the
terminology of the sources, following Eric Midelfort’s use of that generic term
in his The Mad Princes of Renaissance
Germany of two decades ago.) Here,
the author shows how lay litigants (already in the fourteenth century) were
using commonly-known descriptive terms for the mad such as “furioso” and “mentecatto” (from the Latin), and more
colloquially, “pazzo” or “matto,” in their pleas for resolution to whatever
public institution was available to them at the time.
3> The courts being petitioned
for relief in the face of crazy behavior on the part of a relative began with
that of the Podestà and the Capitano del Popolo and after their dissolution,
the office of the Pupilli, which was heavily involved in making decisions in
cases of non compos mentis. This responsibility
then shifted partially to the Otto di Guardia e Balia, which took over criminal
cases in Florence in 1502. In other
words, the public institutions charged with hearing cases of reputed insanity
morphed several times over the three hundred year period the book covers. Eventually,
especially after 1621-59 with the compilation of medico-legal terminology by Paolo
Zacchia (1584-1659), medical terms entered official documents, and specific
ailments such as melancholia, mania, frenzy and epilepsy occasionally appeared
as forensic evidence to assert madness.
Even lay people by this time were using humoral language in their court
appeals to establish insanity, especially in cases of alleged melancholia.
4> Chapter one takes up the
changes over time of the legal apparatus for insuring a family’s material
assets. In cases of mental incapacity,
in general it was the mother who was the favored guardian of a troubled family
member, and Mellyn points out that the naming of a guardian was a highly
publicized event in order to vet any scurrilous motive behind the request. The Office of the Pupilli was charged to
provide for the proper guardianship of the mentally incompetent, but communal
concern seems to have been primarily fiscal.
The court systems in place understood the worries of families grappling
with unfit relatives squandering the family purse, and moved to intervene when
necessary. By the 1470s, the workload of
the Pupilli had expanded its scope beyond the city to include the Tuscan
domains governed by the commune, and by 1550, as Mellyn writes “the Pupilli had
become a court with a significant amount of power to intervene in family affairs.”
(38) Female agency is addressed here,
many litigants being women of rich families who played a major role in
guardianship requests.
5> Following these relatively
mild cases, chapter two takes up the question of what to do with the criminally
insane who were often mixing it up in the street. Unfortunately, this is one question that remains
unanswered in this book, as family diaries (ricordanze) are mute on the subject
of familial madness, and the decisions rendered by various magistracies dealt first
and foremost with the legal status of the person accused of madness. Rarely did the state see to the quotidian
demands of his or her care, as there were few facilities equipped to house mad men
or women. The Florentine jail of the
Stinche could house people for a while if their families could pay for their
upkeep, but not for long. Sometimes
families sought help from the city hospital of Santa Maria Nuova where poor
people out of their minds could get temporary help, but hospitals did not have
the facilities to cope with the disruptive and potentially dangerous. Other
times families of substance tried to gain admission to a convent or monastery
for their mad relative; however, religious houses did not want to accept the
insane. It was a cycle of street, prison, and hospital, with no end in sight.
6> And so, families had no
recourse for the most part, to any outside assistance. They enlisted the services of their domestic
help; they tied the mad up with ropes or chains, or locked them away in a
special room in their house that was secure, or put them in a separate
habitation out in the countryside and left them there with a servant or two. There was no adequate answer to the problem and
the state did not intervene in treatment.
As Mellyn writes, “The podesterial gaze stopped at the door of the
household.” (71) It was, as Olwen Hufton
first wrote, a “society of makeshifts,” which was not ameliorated until modestly
in 1643, when Carmelite friar Alberto Leoni da Revere founded Santa Dorotea dei
Pazzerelli, the first institution in Florence that provided custodial care for
the severely mentally ill; an institution of only fifty beds. Some forty years later, the hospital of Santa
Maria Nuova added a ward for the mentally incapacitated poor.
7> Chapter three opens with
the example of Francis of Assisi’s abandonment of all his material goods and
how its meaning was seen in 1206 as the embodiment of apostolic poverty, not
the act of a crazy man. The author
contrasts this with the way in which Renaissance society’s relationship to
goods had so changed two hundred years later that a similar abandonment of
property would be seen as “mad” and as potentially dangerous to the stability
of the state. Mellyn goes on to discuss
the issue of family spendthrifts who threated what she calls “patrimonial
rationality,” that is, the rational protection of patrimony that any sane
person would seek to achieve. (22) By
1415, the state could forbid an imprudent man from entering into legal
contracts, and eventually by 1565, two ancient Roman legal categories, that of
“spendthrift” and “mental incapacity” would be legally conflated into one. She notes however that this conflation can be
seen in the literature as early as the 1300s and writes that this fact captures
“something of the anxiety families and civil authorities felt about the proper
use and abuse of wealth.” (97) In
Florence, “failure to make sound financial decisions could be associated with
mental incompetence in court.” (111)
8> In chapter four, the author
engages the very language of madness as it changed over time from descriptive
to pathological. Here she provides an
overview of the medical thinking of the day from Hippocrates to Galen—the structure
of the four humors and what constituted mental stability. Increasingly “mad” behavior was now linked to
disease, and the key to mental stability lay in managing the six “non-naturals”
(environment and climate, diet, evacuation and retention of bodily substances, exercise
and rest, sleep and waking, and the passions of the soul) in order to balance
the personality. Preachers also linked the “disordered soul” to the imbalanced
body while others claimed that a demon could unbalance a body and that the
devil might induce madness. At the same
time, the author is quick to remind the reader that “what constituted mental or
physical incapacity was in part socially constructed.” (150) Especially the term “melancholy” became a
“useful catchall disease” applied to unsettled kin who were making a mess of
the family patrimony. The whole point of
intervention in a family’s difficulty with an “unbalanced” person was to
“maintain order in families and communities.” (145)
9> And finally, in chapter
five, Mellyn takes up the case of the widow Maria de’ Placidi from 1567 whose
sister Thommasa declared her “vexed by melancholy humors” due to the fact that
she had deeded over family property in Rome to one Piero Mellini, who was
unrelated to them, but with whom she had had a relationship. This gift of property, Thommasa argued, would
deprive their niece of her dowry and possibly ruin the family financially. What
follows is the tricky back and forth between two sets of witnesses in court
proceedings who argue both for and against Maria’s mental capabilities, and by
doing, underline the difficulties in proving a state of “madness.” (166) In court, the plaintiffs needed to be able to
link madness to the specific time a contract had been made. The issue of lucid intervals between bouts of
madness also clouded the picture of Maria’s mental state. Ultimately however, as in many of these early
modern cases, the final disposition of this one remains unknown, due to the
silence of incomplete source material.
10> In conclusion, this
scholarly study is a well-documented overview of the cases of madness brought
before the courts of early modern Tuscany that will be thought-provoking to
anyone interested in social or cultural history. Once the reader gets through the necessarily
baroque legal structure of the commune, there are flashes of the actually
afflicted which emerge.
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Carole Collier
Frick (Ph.D. History, UCLA, 1995) is Professor of History and Chair of
the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville. She works in early modern European history from a feminist
perspective with a focus in Renaissance Italy. Research interests include material
culture, the needle-trades, clothing and the semiotics of dress; art and
images.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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