A history of madness, medicine, and the law in Italy, 1350--1650

My dissertation explores medical and legal attitudes to madness in Italy from 1350 to 1650 with a particular emphasis on Florence. In this study, madness serves as a two-way lens. On the one hand, it offers insight into the intellectual and institutional development of two of the most important learned professions in early modern Italy: medicine and the law. It charts how the normative language of madness in both medical and legal consultative literature changed and interacted in the period between 1350 and 1650. On the other hand, it investigates how Florentines as consumers of both medicine and justice used, manipulated, and in some cases, transformed medical and legal definitions of madness to serve their own ends. I have sought answers to these particular questions in cases emanating from both the civil and criminal courts of Florence. Thus, my dissertation seeks to integrate learned legal and medical literature, the strategies that litigants used to serve practical ends or private interests, and the tactics employed by magistrates to resolve contemporary problems of public order through the formal apparatus of the courts.;I ultimately conclude that the legal and medical approaches to managing madness in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, originally autonomous and with little interaction, became increasingly connected in the sixteenth century as the consumers of the courts saw madness more and more as an illness and used medical language in legal proceedings.