Synopses & Reviews
During the sixteenth century close to thirty German dukes, landgraves, and counts, plus one Holy Roman emperor, were known as mad- so mentallydisordered that serious steps had to be taken to remove them from office or toobtain medical care for them. This book is the first study these princes, and a fewprincesses, as a group in context. The result is a flood of new light on the historyof Renaissance medicine and of psychiatry, on German politics and in the century ofReformation, and on the shifting Renaissance definitions ofmadness.