In Praise of Folie: The Uses of Madness in Medieval French Literature
Existing scholarship on madness in medieval (mostly English) literature is dedicated predominantly to typological schematization or to clinical descriptions of medieval madness, either in terms of medieval theories of insanity or from a more modern, often Lacanian, perspective. More properly literary accounts, notably Sylvia Huot’s excellent Madness in Medieval French Literature (2003), tend to privilege the ways in which madness constructs, deconstructs, and problematizes individual and collective identities and their articulation with each other. Without excluding these issues, this...
