Revelation

Tudor views of madness were more varied and more sophisticated than one might imagine. As with all branches of medicine, views of mental illness were based on the theory of imbalances between the 'four humours' of which the human body was made up. Thus, for example, the advice to the melancholic to eat salad because of its cold and wet properties. But there is also much evidence of 'common-sense' remedies, such as encouraging the 'melancholic' or 'mopish' (as upper-class and lower-class depressives were respectively called) to get out of the house, take the air, listen to music and enjoy cheerful conversation. I do not think Guy's solutions would have been unusual, although his interest in the subject of mental illness would have been. On the other hand, both Catholics and Protestants would often see the more florid types of mental illness as evidence of possession; Catholics tended to prescribe confession and appeal to sacred images, Protestants prayer and fasting. Occasionally, as happens to Adam Kite in the book, a mentally unstable religious obsessive could find himself in danger of being accused of heresy and burned at the stake. For early modern views of medicine, I found Roy Porter's A Social History of Madness (London 1987) a very useful introduction, while Michael MacDonald's Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge 1981) gives a fascinating picture of an early seventeenth-century therapist. His practice included cases of 'salvation panic' such as that from which Adam Kite suffers, and which seems to have been a new phenomenon brought about by Lutheran and Calvinist notions of God's predestined division of humanity into the saved and the damned. It has reappeared often during fundamentalist campaigns in the centuries since — the first great Awakening in eighteenth-century colonial America featured several notable suicides by people who had come to believe they were irrevocably damned.

As for care for the mentally ill, this was rudimentary and only accessible to the rich, like all medicine. Foucault has seen the emergence of mental hospitals in the eighteenth century, when people working in industrial environments could no longer look after mentally ill relatives at home, as 'the great confinement'. This assumes, however, that pre-industrial societies looked after the mentally backward and mentally ill better. While this may be true to some extent of those with low intelligence, who might be cared for at home, there are too many accounts of those with severe mental illness being chained up at home or abandoned to live and frequently die in uninhabited regions ('the wild men of the woods') for us to believe that life for the mentally ill in early modern Europe was anything other than precarious and grim.

The Bedlam, originally founded in the fifteenth century as a hospital for London's mentally ill, was one of the very few hospitals for those with mental problems in Europe. It has earned a grim reputation, not least because of the image of people visiting the Bedlam to laugh at the antics of the chained-up lunatics as a weekend diversion. This did indeed happen, but not until Stuart times. Little is known about the Tudor institution except that it housed perhaps thirty inmates, that they were usually kept there for a year (though some stayed for much longer), at the end of which they were discharged whether cured or not, and that it was a paying institution, which meant that most of the inmates came from the wealthier classes. There may have been some serious attempts at treatment at this time in the hospital, but the fact that the wardenship was used as a source of profit, and the grim conditions prevailing at most such 'privatized' institutions at the time, argue in favour of a more neglectful regime. But we do not know, so I have had to invent.

For background research, I had to read a number of books on serial killers. What struck me forcibly was that while there are certain common patterns that appear in the lives of these people, few exhibit all of these features, and there is still no real understanding of what turns some people down this terrible path.

The case of Gilles de Rais is, unfortunately, historically true. Strodyr, however, is an invention — I have been unable to find any verifiable references to serial killers in medieval England. Of course, given the lack of any real detection process at the time, that does not rule out there being any. I am grateful to James Willoughby for helping me by looking at the records of one possible case, which however turned out to be a canard.

On a somewhat lighter note, John Woodward's The Strange Story of False Teeth (Routledge 1968) was very helpful, although I disagree with his view that this sixteenth-century French fashion did not gain any popularity in England.