ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: Violence and Altered Mental States in Renaissance Life and Literature, is the first of two chapters that apply the concepts of liminal gender and sexuality to intersecting categories and specifically to aspects of disability. This chapter looks at violence as a cause, symptom, and treatment of early modern madness, a broadly defined state which inhabited a border space between life and death, human and non-human, demonic and divine. It includes discussion of a variety of types of madness and liminal mental states including ‘amazement’, a mental processing state necessary for psychological progress.
