ABSTRACT
An examination of the intellectual context within which the royal notaries worked sheds light on the complex layers of language about madness in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Legal texts conceived of mental illness as an inability to comprehend, and therefore a propensity to infringe upon, the rules governing social and legal interactions. The royal notaries were not solely influenced by legal terminology and concepts, however. The language they used to describe madness pulled from a wide variety of discourses to present a fuller understanding of the meaning of mental incapacity. Unlike scholars writing within a single discourse, however, notaries often combined terms in an effort to express their particular image of madness.
