Madness in Medieval Law and Custom

This collection of essays opens a new discussion about the mind, body, and spirit of the mad in medieval Europe. The authors examine a broad spectrum of mental and emotional issues, which medieval authors point out as ‘unusual’ behavior. With the emerging field of medieval disability studies in mind, the authors have carefully considered legal and cultural descriptions for insight into the perception and understanding of mental impairment. These essays on madness in the Middle Ages elucidate how medieval society conceptualized mental afflictions. Individually, the essays cover aspects of mental impairment from a variety of angles to unearth collectively medieval perspectives on mental affliction.
Contributors are James R. King, Kate McGrath, Irina Metzler, Aleksandra Pfau, Cory James Rushton, Margaret Trenchard-Smith, and Wendy J. Turner.

Wendy J. Turner—Ph.D. (2000) History, UCLA, Associate Professor of History at Augusta State University—works on medieval mental health, as in, “Mental Incapacity and Financing War in Medieval England” (The Hundred Years War, 2: Different Vistas (Brill, 2008).