{"id":41886,"date":"2020-02-29T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2020-02-29T06:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41886"},"modified":"2020-02-28T09:17:10","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T14:17:10","slug":"qotd-perceived-causes-of-madness-during-the-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/02\/29\/qotd-perceived-causes-of-madness-during-the-renaissance\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Perceived causes of madness during the Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Eventually the Renaissance became less of an impending threat and more of a <em>fait accompli<\/em>, and people&#8217;s worries died down a bit. Madness began to be treated more as ordinary immorality. This didn&#8217;t necessarily mean people freely chose to be mad \u2013 the classical age didn&#8217;t think in exactly the same &#8220;it&#8217;s your fault&#8221; vs. &#8220;it&#8217;s biological&#8221; terms we do \u2013 but it was considered due to a weakness of character in the same way as other failures.<\/p>\n<p>In some cases, it was the result of an excess of passions, flightiness, or imagination: the most famous example is Don Quixote, who went crazy after reading too many fiction books. This was actually considered a very serious risk by practically all classical authorities, especially for women. Foucault quotes Edme-Pierre Beauchesne:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>In the earliest epochs of French gallantry and manners, the less perfected minds of women were content with facts and events as marvelous as they were unbelievable; now they demand believable facts yet sentiments so marvelous that their own minds are disturbed and confounded by them; they then seek, in all that surrounds them, to realize the marvels by which they are enchanted; but everything seems to them without sentiment and without life, because they are trying to find what does not exist in nature.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And a newspaper of the time:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women&#8217;s health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years &#8230; a girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a good nurse.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Novels weren&#8217;t the only danger, of course. There were other hazards to watch for, like waking up too late:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The moment at which our women rise in Paris is far removed from that which nature has indicated; the best hours of the day have slipped away; the purest air has disappeared; no one has benefited from it. The vapors, the harmful exhalations, attracted by the sun&#8217;s heat, are already rising in the atmosphere.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also, freedom:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>For a long time, certain forms of melancholia were considered specifically English; this was a fact in medicine and a constant in literature &#8230; Spurzheim made a synthesis of all these analyses in one of the last texts devoted to them. Madness, &#8220;more frequent in England than anywhere else,&#8221; is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there, and of the wealth universally enjoyed. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. &#8220;Religious sentiments exist without restriction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him&#8221;, and by listening to such different opinions, &#8220;minds are disturbed in the search for truth.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are a <em>very<\/em> selective sampling of quotes from just one of Foucault&#8217;s many chapters, and some of them are separated by centuries from others, but the overall impression I got was that conformity\/wholesomeness\/clean living was salubrious, and deviations from these likely to cause madness. Essentially, if you deviate from your humanity a little bit of the way \u2013 by failing to be a godly, sober-living, and industrious person \u2013 then that can compound on itself and make you lose practically all of your humanity. You will end up a feral madman, little different from a beast.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Alexander, <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2018\/01\/04\/book-review-madness-and-civilization\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Book review: Madness and Civilization&#8221;, <em>Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2018-01-04.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eventually the Renaissance became less of an impending threat and more of a fait accompli, and people&#8217;s worries died down a bit. Madness began to be treated more as ordinary immorality. This didn&#8217;t necessarily mean people freely chose to be mad \u2013 the classical age didn&#8217;t think in exactly the same &#8220;it&#8217;s your fault&#8221; vs. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,62,1117,66,7,41],"tags":[906,786,43,134],"class_list":["post-41886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-france","category-health-science","category-history","category-quotations","tag-mentalhealth","tag-paris","tag-women","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aTA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41886"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55331,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41886\/revisions\/55331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}