The social function of the Mad from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Abstract

In the autumn of 2024, the Louvre in Paris hosted a major exhibition entitled Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics. This paper draws on some of the exhibition’s themes to explore the changes in the social function of the fool during the period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

We begin with the medieval fool – the insane who denies God's existence and serves as the emblematic representative of all human evils and vices. We then move through the village and court simpleton - the fool who is laughed at – before arriving at the wise fool of Renaissance courts, who embodies a critical or subversive gaze that remains communicative: the fool with whom one laughs.

In the modern era, the proliferation of fools, exemplified in The Ship of Fools, reflects a society on the brink of chaos. In the work of Hieronymus Bosch in the 16th century, one can discern an ironic ambiguity and a critical, communicative function of the mad, which, according to Foucault, would gradually be lost in the centuries that followed.

Building on these insights from the exhibition, we aim to highlight the protean figure of the fool and his varied yet constant social function, pausing at the threshold where the scientific observation of madness begins and the fool undergoes contemporary medicalization.