Abstract
Historically, English law has not constructed insanity as intrinsic to the individual, but rather as something to be determined by his or her abilities within the context of a particular situation. The courtroom provides the most visible forum within which the discourses of law and medicine interact, and yet the civil law context has been left largely unexamined by historians of madness. This paper seeks to begin to address that gap, through an examination of court cases determining competency in marriage. Using primarily nineteenth-century cases—claiming nullity of marriage on the basis that one party was insane and thus unable to give valid consent to the marriage contract—it explores how this 'compartment' of insanity is conceptualised.
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