Taming Madness: Moral Discourse and Allegory in Counter-Reformation Spain

Abstract

In the early modern period, madness assumed an important role in European thought and to a certain extent replaced the obsession with death which had characterized the preceding centuries. Like death before it, madness was seen as a means of accessing truth, but this was now an incomplete truth full of ambivalence and ambiguity since folly was being reclaimed as a relative form of reason. This article examines how this new vision of madness influenced Spanish thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Overall, it can be said that the positive and liberating view of madness, as conveyed by Erasmus, predominated in Spain until the end of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, the spirit of the Counter-Reformation tried gradually to constrain the omnipresent madness, associating it with the most reprehensible of vices, while understanding sanity to be the cultivation of Christian virtues. Despite attempts by a reductionist moral discourse to tame madness, however, it proved to be an unmanageable beast which continued to multiply and display a thousand and one difference faces.