Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor

An exploration of the medieval mind as a machine, and how it might be affected and immobiled, in textual reactions to the madness of Charles VI of France.

At the turn of the fifteenth century it must have seemed to many French people that the world was going mad. King Charles VI suffered his first bout of mental illness in 1392, and he underwent intermittent bouts of frenzy, melancholy and ever—scarcer lucidity until his death in 1422. The king's scarcely mentionable malady was mirrored at e...