Der Wahnsinn der Helden

Madness as a theme is not only negotiated in contemporary literature; the conceptualization of mental illness has a long history, which can be approached, for example, through literary texts of earlier epochs. Thus, 'foolishness' and 'madness' in Hartmann von Aue's novel "Iwein" and in "Prose Lancelot" have obvious structural similarities with the 'melancholia' of scholastic medicine, a medical doctrine in the tradition of ancient and Arabic medicine. A picture of madness in the Middle Ages based on the then virulent doctrine of temperaments and the four humors is methodically contrasted with Michel Foucault's socio-critical thesis of madness, captured in the term 'folie'. In the detailed analysis of Iwein's and Lancelot's madness in the present treatise, it becomes apparent that it is particularly fruitful to.