Abstract

Few aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention to the river. Based on archival research in Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, this article offers a critical insight into how some medieval cities managed their problematic mad. In particular, it uncovers the widespread and little-understood practice of expelling the mad from late medieval German towns. It argues that the practice of expulsion was multilayered, ranging from relatively benign trips to convey a mad person back home, to official banishments of criminal mad men and women. It finds that most of the expelled mad, however, were simply sent away, out of the city walls and away from municipal responsibility. These expulsions appear frequently in fifteenth-century records and reveal that one particular kind of route was preferred by cities in Southern Germany: the river. In fact, municipal leaders routinely used the Danube, the Isar, and the Main rivers as the best way to rid their towns of difficult or friendless mad persons. While such river journeys did not take place on “ships of fools,” the river was thus a critical and meaningful part of the geographic and cultural landscapes of madness.

中文翻译：

---

航运傻瓜：中世纪后期德国福柯的游荡狂人和公民责任

摘要

米歇尔·福柯开创性研究《疯狂的历史》的几个方面与福柯所说的中世纪疯人在欧洲河流中航行作为现实世界中傻瓜船的文学和艺术形式的对立面相比，人们对福柯的说法更为广泛和嘲弄。但是，尽管福柯在许多假设中都不是正确的，但他提请人们注意河水也不是完全错误的。基于对纽伦堡，慕尼黑和法兰克福的档案研究，本文提供了对一些中世纪城市如何管理其问题狂的批判性见解。特别是，它揭示了驱散疯人从中世纪晚期的德国城镇中流传开来的普遍且鲜为人知的做法。它辩称，驱逐的行为是多层的，从相对良性的旅行到将疯子带回国内，再到官方驱逐犯罪的疯子。发现大多数被驱逐的疯子，远离城墙，远离市政责任。这些驱逐出境在15世纪的记录中经常出现，并揭示出德国南部的城市更喜欢一种特定的路线：河流。实际上，市政领导人通常使用多瑙河，伊萨尔河和美因河作为摆脱城镇中困难或无情的疯人的最佳方法。尽管这种河流之旅并非发生在“傻瓜船”上，但河流却是疯狂的地理和文化景观中至关重要的部分。