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Medieval Communities and the Mad : Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France / Aleksandra Nicole Pfau.

By: Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Series: Premodern Health, Disease, and Disability ; 6Publisher: Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2021]Copyright date: ©2020Description: 1 online resource (202 p.)Content type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9789048533329
Subject(s): Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Composing Communities -- 2. Madness as Communal Threat -- 3. Reintegrating Madness -- Conclusions -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. This book considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. These mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.
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Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Composing Communities -- 2. Madness as Communal Threat -- 3. Reintegrating Madness -- Conclusions -- Bibliography -- Index

Open Access unrestricted online access star

https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2

The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. This book considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. These mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0https://www.aup.nl/en/publish/open-access

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jun 2022)

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