Extract

In this richly rewarding book David Lederer seeks to accomplish two broad aims. One is to carve out in the history of psychiatry an honoured place for ‘spiritual physic’, a form of mental health care practised in early modern Europe that was premised on Aristotelian and Galenic understandings of the mind–body relationship and that was used in attempts to restore the equilibrium of troubled individuals through an array of spiritual procedures ranging from auricular confession to exorcisms. The other is to tell the story of the rise and decline of spiritual physic from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century in its full political, religious and social context, using ducal/electoral Bavaria as a regional case study. The empirical basis of this study is Lederer's diligent archival work, in which he pieced together from judicial and ecclesiastical records the case histories of some 2000 afflicted individuals; but equally important is his skilful incorporation of findings from scholarly literatures on madness in early modern Europe, the Catholic Reformation, and the state-building efforts of Bavaria's Wittelsbach rulers.

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