Hospital Of Incurable Madness: Lhospedale De Pazzi Incurabili (1586) By Tomaso Garzoni (Volume 352) (Medieval And Renaissance Texts And Studies)

Hospital of Incurable Madness: Lhospedale de pazzi incurabili (1586) by Tomaso Garzoni (Volume 352) (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies)

This translation of Tomaso Garzoni's Renaissance best-seller provides a rich and revealing window on 16th-century views of madness, foolishness, and social deviance. Garzoni's encyclopedic work is perhaps the most important contribution of the last half of the century to the fools genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools also belong. Garzoni provides a spoof of academic writing on madness, with extensive reviews of the medical literature on certain types of madness. A final, intriguing section on the varieties of madness to be found in Garzoni's female patients reveals much about late-Renaissance attitudes towards women.