A History of Delusions by Victoria Shepherd

Author:Victoria Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Delusion;Trauma;History;Psychology;Sociology;Medicine;Mental Health
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2022-04-27T20:57:15+00:00

Charles’s condition is depicted in an illustration to Froissart’s fourteenth-century chronicles. He is in bed, attended by courtiers, one of whom presents him with some sort of elixir. It is contained, appropriately enough, in a precious clear-glass decanter. He’s been handed down to us like this, a caricature of a ‘mad king’, with cushions tied to his backside. This is Charles as a symbol of the lottery of primogeniture, in a line of ‘mad kings’, like Lear raging in the storm. If you’re going to have a hereditary, divine right monarchy, the image says, this is the flipside. Traces of Charles the man are harder to find, never mind a nuanced picture of his formative experiences and influences. We are left with a very few (presumably apocryphal) anecdotes to patch together.

The details of Charles’s life get lost in the phenomenon that glass delusion became, and that he came to represent. It’s a phenomenon that lasted for centuries, and spread way beyond the French court. Cases grew over the sixteenth-century Europe and continued to flourish well into the seventeenth.

The people recording the story as it unrolls refer back to Charles again and again. He’s a puzzling case and still the most renowned sufferer of glass delusion more than two hundred years later when Burton began compiling his encyclopedia of melancholy. At this point cases were concentrated among the wealthy and educated classes of men (although, of course, physicians rarely saw other categories of people). This led contemporary scholars to associate it with the better-known disorder of ‘scholar’s melancholy’. Sufferers were observed to be normal in every respect, bar the belief that they had turned to glass. As a result, they could function relatively well, albeit remaining anxious in case anyone came too close and risked shattering their fragile limbs.

For the aristocracy this was a ‘delusion of grandeur’ in reverse. ‘Madame M’ believed she was related to King Louis. A bona fide princess, Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria, believed she had swallowed a glass piano and insisted, for obvious reasons, that people should not get too close. It caught the private imagination of non-royals, too. In 1583 Tomaso Garzoni reports a Glass Man travelling to Murano. He plans to fling himself into a kiln and be transformed into a goblet.7 Another case features a scholar who believed that the surface of the world was made of glass, beneath which lurked a tangle of serpents. He did not dare leave his bed, fearing he would smash the glass and fall in among the snakes. Painters of ‘Vanitas’ put hourglasses into still lives to remind viewers of the fragility and transience of life.

Distressing material changes in the body often feature in the content of delusions but ‘glass delusion’ was different. Robert Burton’s includes many ‘hypochondriacal’ delusions of the body in The Anatomy of Melancholy, like the baker in Renaissance Italy who thought he was made of butter and wouldn’t go near his bread ovens, or man who ‘thinks he is a nightingale, and therefore sings

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