Download or read book The Hospital of Incurable Madness written by Tomaso Garzoni and published by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This translation of Tomaso Garzoni's Renaissance "best-seller" provides a rich and revealing window on 16th-century views of madness, foolishness, and social deviance. Garzoni's encyclopedic work is perhaps the most important contribution of the last half of the century to the "fools" genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools also belong. Garzoni provides a spoof of academic writing on madness, with extensive "reviews of the medical literature" on certain types of madness. A final, intriguing section on the varieties of madness to be found in Garzoni's female "patients" reveals much about late-Renaissance attitudes towards women. --Book Jacket.