L’amour fou est le propre de l’homme. La folie masculine dans le discours des médecins et des clercs aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge

Abstract

In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, reason and the faculty of judgement were at the heart of the construction of a model of masculinity promoted by clerics for the laity. While the pastoral literature and sermons produced by the mendicant friars made it imperative for men to be able to love their wives in a measured way, passionate love was as much condemned by these clerical texts as it was by the medical treatises and chapters devoted to medicine in the encyclopaedias of the thirteenth century. According to their authors, excessive love leads to madness and folly and runs counter to the model of perfection embodied by masculinity. Yet madness in love and lovesickness, as mental pathologies, are specifically assimilated to the very essence of masculinity in its physiological dispositions, and are attributed to men following the commentary of Girardus Bituricensis. This article explores this ambivalence in a dialogue between medical discourse and clerical sources.

Keywords

• madness
• masculinity
• lovesickness
• passion for love
• reason
• mendicant friars