This collection of essays explores the relation between literature and madness from the Medieval to the Modern period. The essays examine how literature represents the experience of madness and cultural responses to it, and how madness may inspire creativity. The volume also illuminates the history of medicine, demonstrating the shifts and continuities in clinical understandings of and social attitudes to mental illness from the Middle Ages through to the "enlightened" notions of the Eighteenth Century to the development of psychoanalysis.